In our "Champions for Change" workshop, ACTION trained its newest group of media champions; the participants include several pediatricians and a former senator and polio survivor. The eight are buoyed and ready to get started with their work as advocates for child health in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.
CSOs reflected on Gavi’s past and future at the Mid-Term Review. Speaking on the opening plenary panel, Chris Dendys of RESULTS Canada said, “we need to identify better why children are being missed and how we reach them regardless of where they live.”
ACTION and Scaling Up Nutrition Civil Society Networks (SUN CSN) trained youth advocates from around the world alongside the RESULTS International Conference in Washington, DC. The cadre of advocates developed campaign plans, and ACTION and SUN CSN are supporting their nutrition advocacy efforts — in their home countries and on the global stage — and will continue into 2019.
World leaders have committed to achieving specific targets by 2030 related to reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health plus nutrition (RMNCAH+N). Delivery of these targets requires substantial investments through national and international commitments and accountability in budget allocation and spending. In the lead up to this replenishment of the GFF, WACI Health and ACTION facilitated a regional consultation to elevate the voice of civil society through the "GFF We Want" campaign.
One in three people with TB are “missing,” meaning they are either undiagnosed or unreported. That is 3.6 million people whose quality of care — if they received care at all — is simply unknown. In September 2018, heads of state committed to finding and treating all people with TB, including these missing millions, with a goal of diagnosing and treating 40 million people with TB from 2018 to 2022. To find the missing millions with TB, governments, civil society, affected communities, and the private sector must work together with global donors to take 6 actions prescribed by ACTION — as shown in our new TB accountability tool.
I grew up in a village where malnutrition was a big issue, where our neighbors did not have enough food and had a big number of children—some of them stunted. The stunted children repeated countless number of classes. Imagine how painful it is to live in a village and have 38 percent of children, which is 2 in 5, stunted, affecting their academic performance and ultimately their productivity in the future.
“We need to learn to treat tuberculosis (TB) as more than just a bacterium," declared Nawina Kachenga, executive director of CITAMplus and a TB survivor living with HIV. "We need to consider all the ways that it impacts families and communities and make sure we not only have the funding for testing, treatment, and care, but that we are taking down the barriers that keep people from accessing it.”
The congregation of health leaders at the 2018 World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva, Switzerland, this week, is an opportune time to shine a light on the problem of stunting in Africa and for African governments to do more to reverse the negative trends on the continent. While Africa’s land is fertile and productive, children here experience the highest rates of stunting. The contradiction can be explained by the fact that good nutrition is dependent on good agricultural practices.