Population & Family Health

UNICEF publishes The State of the World’s Children (SOWC), a detailed annual report on worldwide conditions that affect children. Each year the SOWC report examines a significant issue; the focus for the 2008 edition is keeping children healthy during their first five years of life. Around the world, policy makers, educators, and relief workers rely on the SOWC.

Child Survival: A Global Challenge is the first SOWC report ever adapted specifically for youth. Written by Cassie Landers, assistant professor of Clinical Population and Family Health, Child Survival: A Global Challenge is the newest addition to TeachUNICEF’s global educational program supported by the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

The UNICEF Youth Report describes both the challenges and successes of child survival efforts. In 2006, for the first time in recent history, the number of children dying before their fifth birthday was less than 10 million a year. This represents a 60 percent reduction in child deaths since 1960. The challenge remains. Each day, an average of more than 26,000 children under five die, most of them from preventable causes, which means that most of their lives could have been saved.

To bring this information into the classroom, Child Survival: A Global Challenge is accompanied by Educator’s Guides for teachers of middle and high school students. The guides contain a series of grade-specific interactive classroom based learning activities to help students analyze:

• What has been achieved;
• What has been learned;
• What actions are being taken at the community, national, and global levels.

A PDF of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF Youth Report as well as the Educators Guides can be downloaded from the TeachUNICEF website.