Global Health Progress

Ambassador Karl Hofmann, a former U.S. Ambassador and State Department official, is President and Chief Executive Officer of Population Services International (PSI).

The Day of the African Child – which commemorates the 1976 Soweto uprising in South Africa and children’s inspirational courage to demand a better future – is upon us.  Having just returned from the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, I am reminded of how far we still have to go to meet our collective responsibility to improve the health, education and livelihood of the children of Africa and of the world.  We’ve come a long way since 1976 – in South Africa and in the world in general – but not nearly as far as we need to.

One of the most powerful panels I attended at the Forum focused on the “Girl Effect” – the extraordinary impact that we can make across a range of development challenges by simply investing more effort and resources in the development of fair opportunities for girls.  This simple, basic, timeless truth – that we can’t unlock a society’s development potential while keeping half the population subordinated or disadvantaged – has been brought home to us time and time again.  Recent World Bank, African Development Bank and other studies have attempted to quantify the drag on economic growth attributable to keeping girls out of school, marginalized, or discriminated against.  As if our hearts weren’t enough to tell us this, the numbers tell a compelling story too.

When we do invest in children in Africa or other parts of the developing world, girls and boys alike are able to achieve extraordinary things, even beyond their remarkable successes to date.  Take Malawi, for example.  Diarrheal disease remains one of the leading causes of death among children in the country.  Most families lack access to safe drinking water, and those that do often find their water dirtied on the long walk home from their access points.

© Jenn Warren/PSI Sudan, 2009

Instead of investing solely in interventions focused on providing tools and information to parents and adults, PSI and other partners of Malawi’s National Ministry of Health focused on the potential of children to change the way their communities worked.  We started a school-based water program and created “water clubs,” where children could learn the importance of safe drinking water.  Each member of the club receives two sachets of water purification solution and is taught the skills needed so they, in turn, can teach their families to treat water.  In 2008, more than 130,000 students were a part of the program and those children helped to prevent thousands of cases of diarrheal disease in their homes and their communities.

While our collective investments in children are paying off, we should remember that, in the time it will take you to read this post, at least two more children will die of a water-related illness.  By the end of the day, that number will reach 6,000.  We are faced with an enormous challenge, but we can overcome it if we are fully committed to the task.  At PSI we have set the bar high and are now aimed at doubling the number of diarrhea cases we help prevent, to 8 million per year.  In addition, we hope to reduce the number of deaths due to diarrheal disease by 10,000 per year, until 2011.

We must all recommit to this path of public/private sector partnerships, around locally-based and sustainable approaches, that – most of all – are aimed at achieving measurable results at scale.   We have the knowledge and tools to help millions of children grow into healthy and productive adults.  The International Day of the African Child is a good occasion to reflect on our work ahead.