GAC welcomes new USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah to the post
By Kathleen Guy
Executive Director of Global Action for Children
It was a long time coming, but we finally have a new Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. On behalf of the world’s vulnerable children whose lives are strengthened by USAID, we welcome Dr. Rajiv Shah whom the Senate confirmed to the critical post last week.
USAID programs are designed to support people in developing countries while building goodwill between our nation and theirs. At Global Action for Children we focus on strengthening programs that give every child worldwide the chance to receive the medicine, protection and care they need to grow up safe and healthy.
By investing in a child, we are not only investing in her future but ours as well. Or as President Obama said in Ghana recently, "in the 21st century, we are called to act by our conscience but also by our common interest, because when a child dies of a preventable disease in Accra, that diminishes us everywhere."
Given his medical background, I don’t need to remind Dr. Shah to prioritize child survival. We know the ways to keep a child alive from diseases like malaria and measles that you and I don’t normally have to worry about. And the good news is, in many cases we are succeeding.
There’s a big scary statistic out there that 24,000 children die each day worldwide from preventable diseases and malnutrition. Yes, that’s 24,000 too many, but it’s not a hopeless number. I remember not long ago when 30,000 children died each day from these causes.
In only a few years, our investments in child survival programs like those at USAID have resulted in 6,000 more children a day having a chance at life who did not before. That’s four kids a minute. More than 2 million a year.
There is one investment in particular that can quickly multiply our progress for children - vaccines. More children worldwide are now vaccinated against more diseases than at any time in human history. Four-in-five kids in the world are now protected against diseases like polio, measles and tuberculosis. Now we must stretch for the children who are the most difficult to reach because they live in the poorest and most marginalized communities.
We also have the opportunity to vaccinate kids for the first time against the two chief child killers - pneumonia and diarrhea. Together these diseases cause more than one-third of preventable child deaths. And together, we can change that sad stat by promoting vaccines.
These life-saving breakthroughs are now available in several developing countries and should be accessible to all.
As Dr. Shah gets to work on President Obama’s upcoming Global Health Initiative, I urge him to prioritize and scale up our investment in vaccines and other simple and cost-effective solutions that will keep a child alive. America’s conscience and common interests depend on our global action for children.
