What is the Accelerated Child Survival and Development Initiative (ACSD)?
UNICEF has pioneered many historic interventions to tackle the root causes of infant and child mortality. Accelerated Child Survival and Development (ACSD) is the latest innovation in UNICEF's child survival work.
ACSD is an integrated program that delivers low-cost, high-impact interventions that dramatically improve child survival over a short period of time. It is a child survival intervention delivered on an accelerated tract—that is, progressing at a more rapid pace—in select countries.
UNICEF's systematic and effective approach includes: identifying the burden of a disease on a child's life, understanding the cause of that disease and the obstacles that get in the way of helping a child to survive. UNICEF takes this approach country by country and then develops a plan of action.
Put another way, UNICEF looks for bottlenecks to success in each country and develops individualized packages ("baskets") of priority interventions based on each country's needs. The package of interventions may include insecticide-treated bed nets for malaria prevention, vitamin A tablets to strengthen a child's immune system, oral rehydration salts to combat diarrheal dehydration, immunizations, anti-retroviral drugs for HIV-infected mothers and children, antibiotics to treat opportunistic AIDS-related illnesses, and drugs to prevent transmission of the HIV virus from mothers to children during birth.
UNICEF is taking the lead in the effort to significantly reduce the under-five child mortality rate by taking the proven ACSD initiative to scale. Priority countries are those identified as having both a high level of under-five mortality rate and a high level of readiness for accelerating the effectiveness of their health care systems.
