Epress.am News from Armenia
The global community can save millions of lives by investing first in the most disadvantaged children and communities, according to a new UNICEF study released today. Such an approach would also address the widening disparities that are accompanying progress toward the MDGs.
The new findings are presented in two publications: Narrowing the Gaps to Meet the Goals and Progress for Children: Achieving the MDGs with Equity, UNICEF’s signature data compendium.
While great progress is being made in international efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals, much more needs to be done over the next five years.
By comparing the effectiveness of different strategies for delivering critical health interventions to those in greatest need, the study found that targeting to the poorest and most disadvantaged children could save more lives per US $1 million spent than the current path.
“Our findings challenge the traditional thinking that focusing on the poorest and most disadvantaged children is not cost-effective,” said Anthony Lake, UNICEF’s Executive Director. “An equity-focused strategy will yield not only a moral victory — right in principle — but an even more exciting one: right in practice [italics in original].”
The study was undertaken in consultation with a range of outside experts, who described the main findings as both surprising and significant.
“The results of the UNICEF study made me think that the equity focus can be persuasive on an instrumental as well as a values basis,” said Lawrence Haddad, Director of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, author of the blog, Development Horizons, and a participant in the working group of outside experts who reviewed the study’s preliminary modeling.