EVERY ONE
EVERY ONE is our global campaign to save millions of children’s lives. We stopped children dying from basic illnesses in rich countries a century ago. With your help, we can end it for good in poor countries too.
24,000 children under the age of five will die today – their lives cut short before they’d really begun. Most of their deaths could have been prevented. But the reality is that not every child has an equal chance of survival. Children from the poorest and most marginalized communities are most likely to die.
Pneumonia, measles, diarrhoea, malaria, HIV and AIDS and complications during pregnancy and after birth cause more than 90% of deaths in children under five. Children who are malnourished are at far greater risk of dying from these causes because they’re too weak to fight disease. Deeper factors including the absence of essential healthcare or the inability of many mothers and their children to access it; lack of access to clean water and safe sanitation and a nutritious diet; lack of maternal education and empowerment and limited access to contraception make some children more likely to fall prey to life-threatening diseases and medical conditions, and limit their chances to recover from them.
We can stop children dying
Proven, low-tech and inexpensive solutions exist to stop children dying. But they’re simply not being deployed on the scale needed to tackle the problem. Most importantly, these deaths are not random events beyond our control. To a considerable extent, they are the outcome of policy and political choices taken by governments. They are also influenced by cultural, economic, environmental, political and social factors that governments, international institutions, the private sector and civil society could help to shape or mitigate. We must address these underlying causes of newborn and child mortality – poverty, discrimination, conflict, the denial of rights and barriers to equitable access to high quality health systems.
What we need is the will – from politicians, the public, aid agencies, companies, EVERY ONE – to make it happen on a global scale.
What needs to change?
Western governments and donors need to double spending on basic healthcare and to combat malnutrition in developing countries. But those countries also need to do their part by creating national plans for tackling child mortality. Resources should be focused on improving the health and nutrition of mothers and helping every child to survive.
Check out how you can get involved to make change happen.
