I received quality prenatal care and gave birth in a state-of-the-art hospital. My kids received essential nutrition from the moment they were born through their early years, giving them a better chance to fight off disease and perform well in school. Today, they are on a path to reaching their full potential.
Many moms in developing countries such as Ethiopia, Niger and India aren’t so lucky.
In fact, children in an alarming number of countries do not get the nutrition they need from pregnancy to their second birthday–the critical window for ensuring healthy growth and development–according to Save the Children’s 13th annual State of the World’s Mothers report. The report shines a spotlight on the lifelong, if not deadly, impact chronic malnutrition has on millions of children across the globe.
I recently spent a week in Africa, my second visit to the continent in 2012. After a quick stop in Cape Town for The Economist’s global meeting on healthcare in Africa I went on to Mozambique to visit Save the Children programs in rural communities in the north of the country.
I came away from this trip with a renewed understanding of the huge difference it makes when a community is really involved with kids’ development. continue reading »
I traveled this week to India, both for Save the Children visits and to take my daughter Molly (10) and son Patrick (16) along to see a fascinating place they had never been during their school break. After the Taj Mahal and the backwaters of Kerala, we went to see a program in action that showed that, even in the toughest places, children can thrive.
We visited the slum area of Okhla, not far from the Save the Children office in Delhi. A mobile health van comes to this dirty, crowded street once a week to deliver two doctors, a nurse, a pharmacist, a full pharmacy and a test lab—all packed inside a small van that visits a different community each afternoon. continue reading »
How do you save the lives of children who would otherwise die of diseases like pneumonia, the number one killer of kids in the developing world? Get a hometown hero on your side.
Frontline Health Workers are saving lives every single day in places like Uganda and Kenya, where I traveled just a week or so ago, and in Nepal, Bangladesh and countries all over the world. These workers—predominantly women—are active in their own communities and often have just a basic primary school education. But they are there every day, in the places where kids and moms are dying and can be saved, using common sense and simple tools to save lives. They are given training on how to recognize and treat basic childhood illness like pneumonia and diarrhea that can kill kids if not treated quickly. They need only simple supplies, like stopwatches to measure a baby’s breathing rate to check for signs of pneumonia, oral rehydration solution to treat dehydration, and simple picture books they can use to teach moms how to breastfeed. These tireless heroes walk hundreds of miles a month to make house calls to pregnant moms, newborns, or sick children who need them.
But these heroes are often working against some tough odds. In Uganda, the average woman has an astounding 7.1 children. And sadly, girls as young as 14 or 15 are giving birth while they are still only kids themselves, when their bodies are often not fully developed. And when children are born close together, women have little time to recover from childbirth or to focus on the health of their young children. Family planning services can be spotty in a place like Uganda, but they are an important part of improving the health of mothers and children—and Frontline Health Workers can help deliver these critical services.
Sometimes health workers are not allowed to treat common childhood diseases, due to push-back from the country’s medical establishment. While doctors and nurses are a very critical part of saving lives, the reality is that many mothers and children can’t or won’t get to a health facility where doctors and nurses are located. Basic health services must be delivered where and when children need them. For parents or pregnant women, it is often not possible to walk for hours to access a clinic or hospital. And sometimes very poor patients can’t come up with the money or supplies they need once they get to a hospital. Poor families don’t have the cash for these basics. Frontline Health Workers need to be able and empowered to treat common childhood and adult illnesses.
It’s estimated that millions of health workers—trained, equipped and supported individuals—are needed in the developing world to provide basic healthcare where it’s most needed. Save the Children has helped form a coalition of organizations here in the U.S. to push for more support for one million of these workers and, specifically, for U.S. funding to train and support 250,000 workers as soon as possible. Waiting means unnecessary deaths. Read more about the joint efforts of the Frontline Health Worker Coalition.
In my travels, it becomes clear to be that heroes come in many forms. There are the community-based heroes mentioned above, who bring much-needed care to their neighbors and friends. There are the individual supporters, like you, who read this blog and are part of making the world a better place for children. And while I was in Uganda, a new group of heroes joined the effort…superheroes, actually! The We Can Be Heroes campaign—featuring the Justice League (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and others)—launched in January to bring superpower attention to the hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa.
The needs of children are great and varied. But each of us can find the hero inside to stand up for a child who deserves better. And in Uganda, Kenya and beyond, kids are healthier thanks to Frontline Health Workers who are providing basic services. These hometown heroes deserve our support…and our thanks.
I’m back now from my trip to Uganda and Kenya, but the images of the children there keep stealing into my thoughts. Pictures of a tiny boy, 14 months old but looking like 4 months, a fragile little girl with stick arms crying on a small cot, a mother cradling her sick 8-month-old son whose wide eyes follow us as we move from bed to bed in the stabilization center. Most have intravenous ports taped to a foot or a hand. We visited all these children in the center in Habaswein, a dusty town in the northeast part of Kenya some 200km from the Somali border. The sun bakes everything brown, but the stabilization center is mercifully cooler. Ten mothers and their children are there today, on clean but sparse beds arranged in rows, some recovering, most in dire need of help for severe malnutrition and medical complications like pneumonia or diarrhea.
I’ll be candid: this is a very tough trip.
Our delegation, which includes our Board Chair Anne Mulcahy, Board members Henry McGee and Bill Haber, as well as Henry’s wife and daughter, visit each bed as the head of Save the Children’s health programs here explains the condition of the children. It is hard to concentrate on anything but the kids, so small and thin, some crying, others lying listlessly in the heat. We meet a boy, 13-months-old who has just been brought to the center. He weighs under 7 kilos, or a little over 14lbs. His eyes are half closed and he only responds when his mother picks him up to move him on his tiny blanket. I try to remember when my own sons weighed 14 lbs – at 4 or 5 months I think? The Save the Children staff tells us this little boy came only yesterday, his mother carrying him on her back and walking many kilometers from a town further east towards the border. He is being treated with antibiotics for pneumonia and given a milk powder called F150, fed by his mother. After several days, he’ll be well enough to get a new formula and within a week, he’ll likely leave with his mother with a supply of Plumpy Nut, a peanut based paste that is super-fortified for malnourished children. Hopefully he’ll recover once he’s home and his mother can start feeding him maize porridge, a local staple, again.
We meet another child, so thin and sick we aren’t sure she will survive the day. We are told she is here for a second time, with pneumonia again. Sometimes the short stint at the center is just not enough to stabilize such sick children. But we also meet a small boy who seems to be recovering well, who has already gained almost four pounds in his five days spent atthe center His eyes are brighter and he’s stronger than the others. His mother gives us a tired smile when we congratulate her on how well he’s doing. Since August, this center has served about 120 children with medical complications and Save the Children has served almost 5,000 with acute malnutrition in the area since January.
But this center should not exist in a place like Habaswein. In fact, it shouldn’t exist anywhere.
There is no reason children should be facing starvation today. And we’re all to blame, really. The failure of the rains here in Kenya and across the region were predicted over a year and a half ago and the international community—donor governments, UN agencies and NGOs like Save the Children—simply took too long to act. By the time we’re seeing starving children in the media, it’s too late for the kids here. It’s estimated that in the 90 days between May 2011 and end July, 29,000 children died of acute malnutrition and complications across the Horn of Africa. Children like the ones we met in Habaswein. Read our report, “A Dangerous Delay,”to understand more of why this tragedy exists and what we can do all do to stop it.
We are still not doing enough, which is very clear in Kenya’s South Wajir district where the center is located. Malnutrition rates continue to soar with May 2011 surveys indicating Global Acute Malnutrition rates of 28.5% and a Severe Acute Malnutrition rate of 4.2%. We need far more resources to reach these children now. Investments in food security programs (to help pastoralist families invest in diversifying their income and food stocks) are so much more cost-effective that delivering millions of tons of food to families everyday, as we are forced to do now. It’s hard to get the attention of donors to give to what we call “disaster risk reduction,” the set of programs in food security and disaster preparedness needed to head off a crisis like the one now stalking the children of Habaswein and throughout the Horn. But it’s where we need to head as soon as we can if we want to stop what is happening in the Horn for good.
The world delayed its initial response to this crisis, and children are paying for it.The children in Habaswein today—and generations of children still to come—deserve better from all of us.
As is almost always the case when large disasters strike, kids suffered disproportionately in 2011 in the face of earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and tornadoes. While the biggest disasters were the tsunami and earthquake in Japan and the resulting nuclear reactor crisis in March, and the Horn of Africa hunger crisis that got the world’s attention this summer, there were more than 20 emergencies in 2011 to which Save the Children and other relief and recovery agencies responded. And in all of them around the world, children bore the brunt of the suffering.
In Japan, where more than 15,000 thousand people died and close to 400,000 lost their homes, children and the elderly were hit hard, given the demographics of the northern coast. Many children lived for weeks in shelters and—though the response by the Japanese government was swift—the impact was painful for children who had lost all their possessions and sometimes family members and friends. Save the Children’s response focused on helping kids transition back to school and we continue to work with local organizations to make sure children’s needs are met, with a special focus on supporting child care for working families. Just like our work in the United States following Hurricane Katrina, we will also focus on making sure future emergency responses in Japan pay more attention to the specific needs of children, working with local government officials as well as community organizations.
A very different emergency unfolded over the summer across the Horn of Africa, where the worst drought in 60 years hit Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. I visited Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world in August, when 1,200 people per day—more than half of them children—were streaming into the camp in search of food, water, and safety. I met a few children who had traveled days on their own or with strangers. Some parents sent their children with relatives or alone to make the dangerous crossing from Somalia to Kenya . As a mom of three children, I can’t imagine anything worse than having to turn your children away to save their lives, or to decide to leave a dying child behind to save another. No parent should have to make that choice.
Save the Children has reached more than 2.1 million people with help in these three African countries in 2011, and the response is not over yet. While the rains have started in some of the hardest-hit regions in the Horn, the malnutrition rates for children continue to be horrendously high. We will continue to provide relief to tens of thousands of families throughout 2012.
Right here in the United States, a series of deadly tornadoes of historic proportion hit Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri in late spring and early summer. Save the Children helped serve children in shelters, working with the Red Cross and other partners to ensure that children who had lost everything had some measure of comfort and a safe place to stay. And we continue to support hardest-hit Alabama with emotional recovery programs for children and caregivers. The work we did following Katrina is paying off, with much more attention to kids’ needs before, during and after these disasters– more than we had ever seen. While it takes years for these new ways of working to be part of disaster response systems inside states, we could see they were making a real difference for real kids. Yet only 17 states meet all four of our basic preparedness and safety standards to protect kids in schools and child care facilities during a disaster. There is still more to do.
And that’s one of our biggest continuing challenges in our emergency work – to respond to emergencies while at the same time trying to prepare for or mitigate the underlying factors that cause them. For almost a decade we have been working in Ethiopia to help pastoralists (people who make a living from their sheep, goats, cattle, and camels and move with their animals from place to place) to withstand periodic droughts and better predict when longer droughts are coming. Our efforts on food security and coping mechanisms helped Ethiopians help themselves through the Horn of Africa drought with the proper knowledge and tools. This advanced planning helped tens of thousands of Ethiopians escape hunger and death during the recent crisis.
It is widely believed that many more would have died in Japan without the warning system and rapid response mechanisms the Japanese government has developed over decades. It is hard and often unrecognized work, but it is the key to saving millions of lives when disasters strike. And it is work that Save the Children will be spending more and more time and effort on as the number of disasters seems to climb each year.
With the help of our many supporters throughout the world, we raised almost $150 million for emergency work in 2011 and saved and improved millions of lives. No one can predict the future, and I don’t know what 2012 has in store for me or for the children of the world. But I do know that we will work to prepare families to face the challenges ahead, to safeguard the wellbeing of children in crisis and to make 2012—and every year following—a better time to be a child.
As I reflect back on 2011, the changes in the world and the world for children were vast, both here in the United States and around the world.
Here in the US, more children are living in poverty as we begin 2012 than in the last 20 years, both as a percentage of our kids and as a total number. Across the US, nearly 1 in 4 children live in poverty today—a frightening 22%. And these kids living in poverty are facing some of the greatest opportunity gaps our country has ever seen. On average, a poor 4 year old in the US is 18 months behind developmentally versus a middle-class 4 year old.
That’s why Save the Children focuses on literacy in our US programs and why we are starting earlier and earlier. By beginning additional work with kids on reading in pre-school and even earlier, kids in our programs on average improve by an additional five months of school in reading for each year they spend in our after school or in school literacy program in elementary school (above and beyond what would be expected during the school year). It’s a cost-effective way to give poor children a shot at getting through to high school and even college. It’s a program that helps to even the playing field—and there are many more kids who need these kinds of programs all around the US.
In Africa and Asia, kids first have to survive before they can thrive in school. For the first time in history, less than 8 million children died in 2010 from preventable diseases as reported this year. When I started working for Save the Children in 1998, the number was over 11 million—so saving over 3 million lives, due to the work of many organizations, governments, and private efforts, is real progress. And the progress is accelerating as health care improves in many countries, especially in Asia. But there is absolutely no reason we can’t save many more kids, especially infants, where in many critical countries like Ethiopia, 45% of deaths occur in the first month of life. We know the solutions for many illnesses that affect babies and we also know the way to get those solutions to kids. More trained and better-supported frontline health workers can save millions more lives.
While it takes resources and some outside help, the biggest factor in stopping a death sentence for so many children in the developing world is the political will and resolve of countries where kids are dying. In places like Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries on earth with $590 gross national income per year, support from governments like the US and UK, together with support from NGOs like Save the Children, and from corporations across the world, help empower government leaders who have decided their children don’t need to die. These coalitions are training millions of community health workers, often women with very basic educations, who can now diagnose and treat the main killers of children like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria.
To meet a few of these women, check out this video:
Africa is also the continent where HIV/AIDS continues to wreak havoc for families and children, though far more parents are living with AIDS now in Africa, thanks in large part to the PEPFAR and Global Fund programs that provide ARV drugs, largely supported by US taxpayers. The year 2011 marked the 30th year of the epidemic and kids in the developing world still face losing their parents, being left on their own, and the risk of mother-to-child transmission. Save the Children works across Africa to support communities to be able to take care or orphaned and vulnerable children.
We made a lot of progress in 2011, but we still have much more to do. Save the Children will continue our efforts to reach children in need with vital services and work to make 2012 a better year for the children of the world.
I travel all over the world with Save the Children, but I spent time earlier this week visiting some of our most important efforts anywhere—those for kids right here at home. Poverty rates here in the United States are some of the worst we have seen in decades with nearly 1 in 4 kids living in poverty. And in areas like Clarendon County, South Carolina, where I visited this week, 38% of children live below the poverty line. In some counties we serve across the state, that number is more than 50%.
What’s the best way to change these statistics? Make sure that every child gets through the fourth grade learning to read. The data is clear: kids who can’t read at grade level by the time they leave elementary school have a very steep hill to climb. Many drop out in middle school and even more by high school. The poverty trap starts all over again when these kids drop out. continue reading »
On Tuesday night, I had the chance to speak to more than 1,000 Save the Children supporters about our work around the world and the challenges we face in 2012. It was a great opportunity to answer questions, talk about the big picture and thank just a few of the many people who are committed to making this a better world for children. I was inspired, once again, by the passion and commitment of Save the Children’s supporters and friends.
If you weren’t able to join the call, please feel free to listen to it below. Thanks to everyone for joining and for submitting questions—for those I didn’t get to on the phone, I’ll be working to answer them on my blog.
You’re invited to spend an evening with me this holiday season – talking together about the remarkable results for children you made possible this year and our plans for the year ahead. For example:
Thanks to friends like you…
… a young girl in Japan is safe, secure and back in school
… a once-desperate East African mother sees her baby start to thrive
… a boy in Kentucky learns about healthy eating and exercise
… a sponsored child in El Salvador knows that someone truly cares
… and so much more.
Most important, I really want to hear from you – so please submit questions you have in the comments section below and then tune in on December 6 at 8pm EST. All you have to do is call 1-888-886-6603 and enter conference number: 17475
I look forward to a great conversation next Tuesday – among friends!
In fact, children in an alarming number of countries do not get the nutrition they need from pregnancy to their second birthday–the critical window for ensuring healthy growth and development–according to Save the Children’s 13th annual State of the World’s Mothers report. The report shines a spotlight on the lifelong, if not deadly, impact chronic malnutrition has on millions of children across the globe.
