Global Action for Children

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama vowed to add $1 billion annually to the U.S. fund that George W. Bush and Congress created to fight AIDS in Africa and other developing nations.

Instead, as president, Obama proposed only a $366 million increase for the coming fiscal year – which comes on top of another broken promise from last year. In 2009, he proposed spending only $165 million for PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

Access to clean water has always been a problem in Pakistan, but the floods have made the situation much worse by breaking open sewer lines, filling wells with dirty water and displacing millions of people who have been forced to use the contaminated water around them.

The environment is especially dangerous for children, who are more vulnerable to diseases such as diarrhea and dysentery because they are more easily dehydrated. Many children in Pakistan also suffered from malnutrition before the floods hit, leaving them with weakened immune systems.

It is heartening to see the progress being made to build, for the first time, a strong education sector in Haiti. But, unfortunately, a critical piece is still absent.

Early childhood development programs that serve children from birth to age 8 would have an immense and lasting positive impact on both individual children and Haiti as a whole.

Although the past 50 years have seen a remarkable decline in child mortality, millions of children continue to die prematurely, and childhood continues to be a time of vulnerability due to a wide range of health risks.

The burden of disease is particularly severe in Africa, but it is also significant in the Eastern Mediterranean and South-East Asian regions, says a report by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The Education for All Act of 2010 is a key step toward ensuring access to school for all children, directly supporting the Millennium Development Goals. If all eight goals are achieved by 2015, including basic education for all children, world poverty will be cut by half and tens of millions of lives will be saved. Funding education is the perhaps the most cost-effective use of our tax dollars, and our global policies should reflect that.

A new clinical trial on rotavirus vaccine in Kenya has shown it to prevent 83.4 percent of children from contracting severe rotavirus, the most common cause of severe diarrhoea among infants during the first year of life.

Merrit Martin, a former intern at GAC, compares her experience with "back to school" in Texas with the 72 million children worldwide who do not have access to schooling.

A plan to build a new education system in Haiti is one of the most encouraging things to emerge from the rubble of the Jan. 12 earthquake. It is expected to be endorsed at a meeting on Tuesday of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the joint Haitian-international body created to guide the country’s rebuilding.

Habibata Ouattara was 17 years old when she was removed from school and forced to marry a man her family had chosen for her. Today, as the Secretary-General of a local School Girl Mothers’ Club – known by the acronym CMEF – Ms. Ouattara strives to ensure that girls in her community stay in school and complete their education.

August 13, 2010: Above all the incessant bickering between Democrats and Republicans, there is at least one bipartisan effort that Americans and President Obama should hear and support.

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., recently expressed concern about the future of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which was signed by former President George W. Bush, as details of the Obama administration's Global Health Initiative emerge.