Giving Compass' Take:

• The Center for High Impact Philanthropy provides guidance for donors on improving child survival rates. 

• The long-term sustainability of child health programs requires investments in areas such as health work force, supply chain and logistics, and information for effective decision making. How is your philanthropy addressing child survival rates?

• Learn more about maternal, newborn and child health. 

Every year over six million children die before they reach their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable causes such as pneumonia and diarrhea.1 The good news is that we have many proven effective tools to prevent and to treat disease and community-level approaches that are relatively low-cost within easy reach of a donor to support. In fact, an estimated two-thirds of child deaths can be prevented with the interventions available and feasible today.

Our series on child survival provides donors with the tools they need to take action:

  • Best evidence-based models and approaches that match the needs on the ground
  • Illustrative examples of how organizations effectively and efficiently deliver the solutions that we know work (including their estimated impacts and related costs)
  • Decision making tools and frameworks for how to think about strategic philanthropic opportunities, use best practices, and estimate impact

Increase access to life-saving prevention and treatment at the community level.

Effective and cost-efficient tools and approaches exist for the most common deadly conditions of childhood but they are not reaching many who need them most.

Strengthen human resource and health system capacity.

Mobile devices and decision assistance may help overcome geographic barriers to get timely data from the community level to improve the quality of care, priority setting, and performance. Creative partnerships of universities, governments, non-profits, and the private sector can together tackle the crisis issue of training and retaining all levels of health workers in the developing world particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Support innovation for new tools and delivery platforms to reach neglected communities.

New discoveries are critical to improve our current tools, develop solutions in neglected areas, and to stay ahead of evolving drug resistance. In addition, new delivery strategies that can reach the rural poor and urban slum dwellers need to be piloted and examined. For example, promising models include those that use microcredit lending groups to reach women and their children with health services or franchised private sector health clinics.

Read the full article about improving child survival rates by the team at The Center for High Impact Philanthropy.