United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is the UN agency for children, working to protect the rights of every child, especially the most disadvantaged and hardest to reach. Across the world, UNICEF delivers and advocates for education, health and nutrition, while also protecting children from violence and abuse, responding to emergencies, and advancing action on climate and gender equality.
UNICEF is one of Save the Children’s most important multilateral partners, rooted in our shared commitment to advance children’s rights and meet their needs in some of the world’s most challenging contexts. Together, we work globally to protect children and improve their wellbeing, with a particular focus on humanitarian action, education in emergencies, nutrition, child protection and child poverty. Our partnership combines global leadership, technical collaboration and field-level response - from co-leading the Global Education Cluster and supporting nutrition coordination through UNICEF’s Global Nutrition Cluster, to advancing advocacy and delivering life-saving support for children affected by conflict, displacement and crisis.
Key Areas of our Partnership:
- Education in Emergencies: Together, we co-lead the Global Education Cluster, ensuring education continues during crises. Save the Children is also a founding partner of Education Cannot Wait, UNICEF’s billion-dollar fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises.
- Nutrition in Emergencies: in UNICEF’s Global Nutrition Cluster, we co-lead the Programme Team, helping drive coordination, technical guidance and support for life-saving nutrition interventions for children in emergencies.
- Humanitarian Action & Protection: UNICEF and Save the Children are both members of The Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, where we work alongside other partners to help prevent and respond to all forms of violence against children.
- Health: we collaborate on a wide range of child health issues through global partnerships such as the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. This collaboration helps strengthen collective action to improve health outcomes for children and families around the world.
- Climate Change: as one of UNICEF’s partners in the Children’s Environmental Health Collaborative, we are helping protect children’s health and development from the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation.
- Child Poverty: we are both members of the Global Coalition to End Child Poverty, collaborating to improve how child poverty is measured and to advocate for social protection policies.
- Emergency Response: when emergencies strike, we work together to provide rapid, life-saving aid, including in nutrition, health, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Our collaboration helps ensure that essential services reach children quickly in some of the world’s most urgent and complex crises.
Our Impact: Global Malnutrition Initiative
Save the Children’s Global Malnutrition Initiative aims to galvanise increased action to prevent, diagnose, and treat child acute malnutrition in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, including Kenya. Through rigorous research, the project seeks to test and scale up cost-effective approaches to diagnose and treat acute malnutrition at the community level.
The project is delivered in partnership with UNICEF, the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the Ministry of Health. The Kenyan Government have recognised Global Malnutrition Initiative’s work with and through community health systems and have facilitated the adoption of simplified approaches. A government-led, phased scale up plan of these services are planned to be rolled out as we generate further evidence to support policy change.
In a remote village in North-West Kenya, Saadia*, faced a harsh reality when a severe drought struck. Her livestock died, and her two-year-old daughter, Aisha*, fell ill due to malnutrition.
"In the middle of the night, I was scared... I held her hand," Saadia* recalled. "When my daughter was sick, I thought she would die. I was terrified to see her in such a situation."
Saadia* embarked on a day long journey to the Save the Children-supported Hospital. Aisha* received vital medical attention and nutritious food paste.
"She has gained weight and is getting stronger," Saadia* proudly reported. "She was sick before I brought her here, but she's now in good health. The medical supplies she got were effective, and she feels good."
With Aisha* now recovered, Saadia* said, "She is happy and healthy! If she is healthy, I can be happy."
