Early this month I took my first trip to Abuja, Nigeria. Despite visiting almost 60 countries with Save the Children, I had never been to the West African nation. It is a country of over 162 million, one of the most populous in the region and seventh most populous in the world. With an average [...]
The Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan is home to more than 100,000 refugees who have fled the fighting in Syria, but it’s unlikely that any of the camp’s residents consider this place—cold, crowded and under resourced—“home.” I traveled to Za’atari last week after the launch of Save the Children’s recent global report, Childhood Under [...]
I expected to be disappointed. Disappointed that more had not been done; disappointed that there were still families living in squalor in tent cities; disappointed that there was still no education or health system; disappointed that there wasn’t more progress. And while I saw things that made me frustrated and angry on my fourth trip [...]
Today’s entry is a guest blog from Le Thi Bich Hang and Nguyen Van Gia, my colleagues in Save the Children’s Vietnam Country Office. I met Hang and Gia during my last trip to Vietnam when, alongside Country Director Huy Sinh Pham and some members of our Board of Trustees, we visited programs that help [...]
Vietnam has made progress by leaps and bounds in the past decade, improving economic growth, boosting newborn and child survival rates and getting more kids in school. As I traveled throughout the country last week, I could see that this progress was rooted in the determination and industriousness of the Vietnamese people. They have worked [...]
When they brought Moussa over and laid him in my arms, my heart stopped for a minute. He was barely breathing and was so frail, I was afraid he might die as I held him. Though he was more than two months old, his arms and legs were tiny and frail and his breathing was [...]
This past week and a half was a busy one—I found myself in Washington, DC; Delhi, India; and Copenhagen, Denmark. In addition to spending lots of hours on planes and sleeping in airports, these vastly different places drove home for me the immense divide between kids’ lives in countries around the world. These differences are [...]
I spent last week in Bangladesh, a country of 161 million people, many of whom live in the capital city of Dhaka. Many of those people, in fact 54 million of them, are kids under 15. And a high percentage of these children start to work by the age of 10 or 12 in order to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
