The world needs more girls like "Alana".
Alana is one of the "lucky" ones. Just five years ago in Uganda, a child had more than a 1 in 10 chance of dying before she reached her fifth birthday. Today the odds have improved slightly, but Uganda remains among the top countries with some of the highest rates of death for children under-five. As the father of three daughters myself, I simply can’t accept that a child’s chance of surviving depends upon where in the world she happens to have been born.
When I see a photo like this, of a bright-eyed girl from a village in Uganda accessing the health care she needs and getting well, I’m reminded why Management Sciences for Health (MSH) works every day to further our vision of a world where everyone has the opportunity for a healthy life.
We’ve come a long way: we’ve reduced child mortality by nearly 70 percent in just 50 years. But a child born in a low-income country is still 18 times more likely to die before the age of five than a child born in a wealthy country.
The tragedy is that we already know how to prevent most child deaths through low-cost, high-impact interventions.