Today, on the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the Christian charity World Vision, which works globally to improve the lives of millions of children, has released a report condemning the lack of action to stop unnecessary deaths of just under 9 million child deaths each year. Yes 9 MILLION – that’s around 24,000 children dying each and every day due to largely preventable causes including malnutrition & extreme hunger, and death in maternity due to poor health services. As a father myself, this really bothers me. How do our governments in the West find it so easy to go to sleep each night knowing that over the last day, so many children have died?

I’m sure we are trying to tackle these issues that affect children so badly, but we need to do more. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were agreed by 192 UN member states back in 2000, and they set out eight primary goals to improve the lives of billions of people by 2015. We are almost two-thirds through that fifteen year window of time. The MDG aimed at cutting child mortality by two-thirds by 2015, MDG4, will be missed if the world continue at the current rate; so far only 30% of the target has been met with only a third of the time left to achieve the rest.

I’m proud of Labour’s record in office on international development. We have almost tripled our national aid budget from where it stood when we took office in 1997, and we’re not far off the global best practice target of 0.7% of GDP going toward issues like the one I’ve outlined here. But only 3% of global aid is currently going toward improving child and maternal health. Raising the amounts of aid we spend on this issue isn’t sufficient alone – we need to ensure that the money is going to the correct countries (World Vision suggests that there are 30 “high burden” countries which account for 80% of the world’s child mortality). And just handing out money without adequately educating local populations about hygiene, family planning, adequate antenatal and postnatal care and how to improve nutrition, is pointless. As with all aid, all money we spend on development issues must be applied free of corruption.

As a dad myself, I find this heartbreaking. It’s upsetting when a child has a simple cold, or a fall or other minor injury. My daughter Sophia almost didn’t make it into this world due to complications at birth, but thanks to the British NHS and the huge investments we make in maternity care everything turned out fine in the end. We are so fortunate living in some of the world’s most developed countries, and we perhaps take it for granted that people living in other countries are receiving the care they need. But they aren’t. Perhaps if people realised this, they would be more inclined to put pressure on the politicians and diplomats who will meet in late 2010 to review the progress of the MDGs so far, and to do more to stop children from dying unnecessarily. If it were happening in our own countries, we would surely nip it in the bud sooner rather than later.

Here are two links from World Vision for further information:

- Why the campaign: http://www.worldvision.org.uk/server.php?show=nav.3361
- What people can do to help: http://www.worldvision.org.uk/server.php?show=nav.3371