Accelerated Child Survival
How the initiative works
© UNICEF/ HQ05-0552/Heger
ETHIOPIA: A health worker from a mobile vaccination team gives a dose of oral polio vaccine to a baby cradled by his mother, during the door-to-door polio NIDs in the town of Shire in Tigray Region. On the vaccine vial, the clear square inside the grey circle indicates that the vaccine is still potent.
Accelerated Child Survival's new approach works with the existing efforts of national governments to upgrade their own health systems, enabling them to assess, customize and deliver highly localized services that best suit individual, family and community needs.
The Child Survival Initiative takes the most effective health interventions for children, newborns and pregnant women and bundles them into integrated, cost-effective packages that include childhood immunizations, vitamin A distribution, treatment of malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and HIV/AIDS, prenatal care and support, and promotion of breastfeeding.
The Initiative also covers the costs of other vital supplies such as bed nets, equipment for refrigeration of medication, transportation, training and performance incentives for health staff, as well as supporting the development of health systems from the district to national level.
To ensure that effective health coverage continues, UNICEF will periodically identify and re-evaluate all major hazards to children's health on both local and regional levels, balancing the assessment against updated estimates of each nation's under-5 mortality rates.
What the initiative will accomplish
The following nations are ready to improve their health care delivery systems and will receive maximum benefit from participating in the Child Survival Initiative:
In 14 countries with high child mortality rates (150—200 deaths per 1,000 live births) Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Cote D'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Swaziland, and Zambia.
- 535,000 children's lives to be saved per year (estimated)
In 11 countries with very high child mortality rates (200+ deaths per 1,000 live births) — Angola, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Somalia.
- 301,000 children's lives to be saved per year (estimated)
UNICEF's Accelerated Child Survival Initiative will save in excess of 800,000 children in this region per year—3.2 million children over four years. The Initiative will also create and improve facilities to meet the future needs of countless other children.
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