#child mortality

How Do You Really Save Children In Ethiopia? 

Through a government program that provides universal, bare-bones, health care, perhaps?

Ethiopia’s network of 30,000 health extension workers provides basic health care across the country.

By treating diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and other common ailments, these health extension workers have been the driving force in reducing Ethiopia’s child mortality rate. They also assist with births and provide routine immunizations to children.

Twenty years ago 1 in 5 kids born in Ethiopia would die before their 5th birthday. Now that rate has been cut in a third to only 1 in 15. The credit for that dramatic drop goes largely to women like health worker Foos Muhamed Gudaal (top) and the government officials who had the vision and conviction to set up such a program.

Photograph:

Top: Health worker Foos Muhamed Gudaal at a rural health post in the eastern Somali Region of Ethiopia (Jason Beaubien/NPR)