We Are All Responsible for Each Other’s Children

By Leith Greenslade Co-Chair, Child Health of MDG Health alliance and Vice Chair, Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Financing the Health Millennium Development Goals

I like to think that if some other mother’s child was in need I would respond, just as it comforts me to think that if my child was in need I could rely on another adult to step in. If we all lived in a world where we acted as if we were responsible for each other’s children, the lives of children would be immeasurably better.

This is one of the reasons I support Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG4) – because it makes us all responsible for each other’s children.  

Back in 2000, when 193 countries pledged to cut their child mortality rates by two-thirds by 2015, they effectively signed up their citizens to the greatest child survival effort in history and made us all responsible for each other’s children in the process.

So when we ask why are we falling so far behind in achieving Millennium Development Goal 4, we can’t just point the finger at governments or at UN agencies. We need to point the finger at ourselves and ask, “Why are 6.6 million children under 5 still dying every year?”  

We know success is possible. Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Mexico, Lao and Liberia have all achieved MDG4  and now Ethiopia and Malawi have crossed the line too.  Millions more children are alive today because of these herculean national efforts.

And with the release of the new UNICEF A Promise Renewed Progress Report today, we know that the numbers of children under 5 dying continue to fall steadily – now at 6.6 million.

But we still need to prevent the deaths of an additional 3.5 million children above the trend rate in less than 900 days to achieve MDG4 and the current rate of progress will simply not get us there.  We need to be reducing child deaths at four times the rate that we currently are.

The message is clear and simple.  We won’t achieve MDG4 with a ‘business as usual’ approach. We need new approaches that can prevent millions of child deaths quickly.  

What if we decided to act as if we were all responsible for the world’s most vulnerable children – the children most at risk of death, the children last to be reached and the children most often left behind?

What if we decided to join forces in a massive, focused effort to reach the greatest concentrations of vulnerable children with the interventions most likely to increase their chances of survival?

We know where these children are.  They are in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.  They are in Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mali.  They are in Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola.  And they are in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.  4 million of all child deaths are concentrated in these four regional blocks.

Many of them are in conflict zones, many of them are refugees or displaced people, most of them are malnourished and all of them are poor.

What if the world mobilized behind a series of child survival campaigns that delivered vaccines, bed nets, medicines to treat pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria, micronutrients and food supplements – the most powerful life-saving interventions - to the children living in these regions?

 And at the same time as we deliver these vaccines and medicines, what if a massive outreach effort was underway to educate and inform pregnant women and new mothers about the basics of safe delivery, newborn care and child feeding practices, and how to recognize and respond to the danger signs of a sick child?

We know that campaigns work.  Some of global health’s biggest success stories – smallpox, measles, polio, Vitamin A, river blindness, guinea worm and malaria – have been delivered via campaigns.  We know that campaigns deliver on reaching large numbers of the most vulnerable in a short space of time and at lower cost compared to routine delivery through whatever health systems might happen to exist.

Put another way if you want to achieve scale with equity and efficiency – both cost and time – campaigns are an obvious strategy.

So why don’t we consider doing exactly this in the two years remaining to 2015 – launch a series of short-term, intensive campaigns to reach the greatest concentrations of vulnerable children with the goal of preventing up to 2 million child deaths and closing the MDG4 achievement gap. 

I am talking about the kind of campaigns that involve unprecedented levels of collaboration across global stakeholders, regional governments and the full engagement, ownership and activation of local communities and their leaders.

The kinds of campaigns that aim to deliver value for children and the adults who care for them by providing fast access to the interventions that will fully protect their children against the leading threats to their survival.

As World Vision says, “extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures”.

The truth is, if each one of the children who are dying was your child, there would be no debate about how achievable this kind of effort was.  We would do whatever it takes.

So let’s try this and fulfill the true spirit and real power of Millennium Development Goal 4.

Let’s act as if we are responsible for each other’s children.

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The MDG Health Alliance is an initiative of the United Nations Special Envoy for Financing the Health MDGs and works in partnership with governments, non-government organizations, academic institutions and corporations to accelerate global progress towards the health related Millennium Development Goals especially Goal #4: saving 4 million children’s lives by 2015. The Alliance operates in support of Every Woman, Every Child, an unprecedented movement spearheaded by the United Nations Secretary-General to intensify global action to improve the health of women and children.