Child Health Now introductory video
Simple interventions could save millions of lives
Today 24,000 children under five will die of preventable causes. Join the Child Health Now campaign and help save millions of children.
[video]
Hello, I’m Kevin Jenkins. Welcome to World Vision. I’m here in a slum near Nairobi, Kenya.
If you have money in Nairobi you have a good chance of getting excellent medical care. But here, citizens are desperate.
Health care is hard to find and even harder to afford. Just because they are born here, children have a greatly reduced chance of making it to five years old.
There are signs of hope. This is Ruai Community Health Centre near Nairobi, where hundreds of families are helped. The centre is built and is run by the community. People can get help with their medical needs.
It’s a powerful intervention, but we’re going to need much, much more, if we’re going to save six million lives.
6 million children can be saved every year.
I’m here at a clinic in Thailand; mothers are getting pre-natal care, children are being immunised. These are the fortunate ones.
By the time you finish watching this video, more than 50 children under five will have died, mostly from preventable causes like diarrhoea, pneumonia, childbirth complications and malaria.
In 3 minutes more than 50 children under the age of 5 will die from preventable causes: diarrhoea, pneumonia, childbirth complications, malaria
The numbers are overwhelming, but the response need not be. Millions of these children could be saved by simple, low-cost interventions.
Simple interventions can save lives
Good nutrition. Proper sanitation. Vaccines. Bed nets. World Vision has been working with these responses for 60 years, but we are determined to make a difference for millions more children. We’ll do it by working with government agencies, other humanitarian organisations, and people throughout the developing world.
Through our global campaign, Child Health Now, we are improving our community based services for mothers and their children. We are helping them raise their voices about their rights to quality health care. We are assisting governments in meeting their responsibilities. We are advocating for better maternal and child health. And we are urging wealthy nations to fulfil promises they made that by 2015 there will be a radical, worldwide improvement in child health.
We have seen the strategy work; now we need to spread it around the world. Clean water, proper sanitation and better hygiene reduce diarrhoea-related diseases by 65 percent. Child health programmes are one of the best investments World Vision, other aid agencies and governments can make. If one more child in 20 survives, economic growth improves by one per cent.
If one more child in 20 survives, a country’s economic growth improves by 1%
As the health and status of women in a community improve, population rates drop because parents have renewed hope that all their children will survive.
We want you to join us. Get informed. You can start by taking a look at our health campaign web pages for more information.
Urge your elected leaders to put child health at the top of their agendas. Write to them or call them. Even visit them in person. Ask them how they’re going to help.
Together, we can make a difference. We can help all God’s children, no matter where they were born, live life in all its fullness.
That’s our World Vision. Thanks for watching.