|
An
MDG That Can Be Met
In September 2000,
United Nations members outlined eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
to reduce poverty and improve people’s lives; 191 member states pledged
to meet these goals by 2015. One MDG calls for reducing the mortality
rate among children under age five by two-thirds within this 15-year
timeframe.
Children born in
low-income countries are 13 times more likely to die before their third
birthday than children born in high-income countries. Over half of the
ten million under-age-five children who die each year are in sub-Saharan
Africa, where only 14 percent of the world’s children reside.
In one of the poorest and most remote regions of
Ghana, in the Kassena-Nankana district where the Navrongo Health Research
Centre is located, the under-five mortality rate has declined
consistently from 188 deaths per thousand in 1993 to 79 in 2003—a 58
percent drop in ten years.
The Population
Council’s collaborative research with the Navrongo Centre has
demonstrated that deploying community nurses to village locations can
accelerate this decline, cutting childhood mortality rates by two-thirds
in only six years. After this strategy was proven replicable in a
similarly poor, rural, but nonresearch setting, the Government of Ghana
made the commitment to scale up the service model (see ”The Navrongo
Experiment”).
In 2005,
representatives of community health programs in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia,
and Sierra Leone met in Navrongo with their Ghanaian counterparts to
review the relevance of findings from the Navrongo research for health
development in other African countries. They formed a steering committee
for ExCHANGE, a network to share ideas on expanding community health
care accessibility. A compendium of papers is being prepared to document
the success of the project’s approach, its health and demographic
effects, and its role in shaping national policy. The volume will set
the stage for new research on the MDGs of reducing child mortality and
of improving maternal health.
|
The MDGs: New Perspectives from Experienced Practitioners
A special issue
of the Population Council’s peer-reviewed journal Studies in
Family Planning published in June featured original essays
by high-level UN staff, scholars, and international
nongovernmental leaders on global efforts to achieve the
Millennium Development Goals. The edition was
developed in anticipation of the UN’s 2005 World Summit in
September to aid review of progress on meeting the goals. To
learn more about how closely the Population Council’s research
aligns with the MDGs, visit
http://www.popcouncil.org/about/MDGs.html. |
(Return to issue contents)
|
