Governments Lack Political Will to Implement Programs Preventing Millions of Child Deaths Each Year
World Vision Rededicating Efforts; Earmarking
$450 Million For Maternal and Child Health Programs
NEW YORK -- As the world's leaders convene at the United Nations this week, one leading international humanitarian organization contends progress is "dismally off-track" for meeting 2015 goals for helping address poverty and injustice.
"If the heads of state, business and financial leaders and others ignore our call and fail to act, the Millennium Development Goals will, quite simply, be unattainable," says Dean R. Hirsch, president of World Vision International. "This month's meeting is the last chance for the international community to demonstrate its resolve and honour its commitment to the world's poorest people."
Hirsch noted that among all eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), reaching numbers four, five and six - reducing child mortality, improving maternal health and combating AIDS, malaria and other diseases - is foundational to addressing severe poverty in the developing world. Moreover, he noted nations have the resources, including food and medicine.
"We have the solutions to implement and thereby prevent the deaths of millions of children each year," says Hirsch, who is addressing world leaders and UN officials September 25 in a series of meetings on the MDGs. "But governments lack the political will."
The goals were established in 2000. Meetings this week at the UN are a reminder that world leaders are halfway to the date they set to accomplish the goals. For more information on each of the goals, visit, http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/.
Hirsch believes that good health is fundamental to breaking the cycle of poverty, and is foundational to a child's well being.
"Recognising this, World Vision has placed community-based maternal and child health at the core of our global health strategy, and we are investing heavily in efforts to help achieve MDGs 4, 5 and 6," Hirsch said.
That investment currently totals about $450 million on health programs - $150 million in funding and another $300 million in donated medical supplies, such as pharmaceuticals. This amount exceeds the entire public health budgets of several developing nations, including Uganda, Mongolia and Zambia, according to World Bank statistics.
"World Vision is increasing it commitment with more money and more staff to more effectively target community-based maternal and child health and promote access to primary care," Hirsch says. "We believe that in three years we can significantly reduce malnutrition for children under five and improve the health of up to five million children."
Speaking at various forums on the MDGs, Hirsch notes that if national leaders accept responsibility for the inadequate progress towards the MDGs, and agree to replicate and scale up successes, there is "a genuine possibility of fulfilling the promises made to the world's poorest people in 2000.
"Our collective challenge - governments, the private sector, humanitarian organizations, civil society groups and others - is to remedy a gross violation of the most basic rights - to clean water, adequate food, basic health care - that currently leads to millions of children and women dying annually from easily preventable causes," Hirsch says. "This is a moral imperative. Every child who dies in extreme poverty represents an unacceptable loss of human potential."
END
Contact: Dean R. Owen, World Vision
dowen@worldvision.org; (+1) 253.906.8645 (cell)
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
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