Accelerated Child Survival
Recent advances reveal the solution
© UNICEF/HQ05-1036/Chalasani
NIGER: Health workers use a MUAC (mid-upper arm circumference) armband to measure malnutrition in a child, who is being carried by his mother to a health clinic in the village of Chadakori in Maradi Region. This clinic provides supplementary feeding for malnourished children and their families. The red section of the measuring the tape indicates that the child is severely malnourished.
During the past few years, research and strong evidence from the field by UNICEF and its partners have begun to yield a surprising conclusion:
The best results in the reduction of early childhood deaths are achieved by a limited number of high-impact, low-cost health interventions, if they can be implemented widely and quickly. These accelerated, large-scale interventions have their greatest impact during their first years of existence, when their delivery systems are actually being built.
These findings hold true for even the poorest countries with the least amount of infrastructure, countries whose health problems have long been thought to be virtually intractable.
However, delivering large amounts of resources is not enough, no matter how quickly help is provided. Knowing precisely when and how to deliver the resources is the most vital element of all.
Today, tomorrow, & beyond
The inability of a poor country's government to correctly identify all of its interlocking health problems means that it cannot allocate its own or anyone else's resources to permanently solve them.
The level of information, technical expertise, and on-the-ground presence required to identify problems is beyond the reach of most NGOs. This problem is even greater for sub-Saharan Africa's severely underdeveloped governments.
UNICEF, with its formidable resources and record of leadership for children's health is increasingly recognized by NGOs and governments, as the best qualified organization to lead the effort in helping developing countries address their child mortality problems. No one else can work with the degree of momentum and scale that UNICEF can.
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