Save the Children - April news letter

Welcome to April’s Save the Children newsletter for the Global Challenge 2007!

Congratulations on your fundraising so far! £56,000 has been raised over the past few months, which is an incredible achievement! Not only that but 6 amazing trekkers have already raised above their minimum amount!!

What your money funds …

The funds raised through the Reckitt Benckiser Global Challenge go 50:50 towards the ‘save 100,000 lives’ programme and the project you will be visiting in India.

The save 100,000 lives programme is working to save children’s lives in Angola & Tanzania. Every three seconds of every day a child dies from preventable diseases such as pneumonia, malaria, diarrhoea or measles.

That’s 30,000 children every day, almost 11 million children every year.

These children die because they do not have access to immunisations and basic healthcare. The save 100,000 lives programme is working to reverse this trend by providing that basic immunisation and healthcare. Just £10 provides simple but essential interventions that will help to save a child’s life.

Programme focus: Angola
Angola has some of the worst maternal and infant mortality rates in the world and is currently the second worst place in the world to be born a child.
Elisa and Nongola, two traditional birth attendants (village midwives) – San José, Huambo province, Angola
In Huambo province, around 80 percent of babies are born at home with the help of village midwives.
These midwives are therefore key for the survival and future development of children. Thanks to the Save 100,000 lives programme, a number of them have received 30 days of training in safe delivery practices and in diagnosis of complicated pregnancy cases.
Elisa and Nongola have been village midwives for a number of years,
they both chose to do it because they liked helping other women but had no specific knowledge nor had received any training.

They were delighted to have completed the training and happy to share their newly acquired knowledge: among other things, they learn about the importance of washing their hands and to recognise complicated pregnancies that need to be referred to hospital. The relevance of the training came to life when they talked about babies that did not cry instantly at birth. Previously, they would have pronounced the baby dead, but now they know techniques to help resuscitate these babies.

Over the last couple of months since their training, Elisa and Nongola had a much higher survival rate and between them have delivered 19 healthy babies.