I know it: you’re looking at that headline and thinking, What terrible thing happens to 18,000 kids a day? What horror is Kristof going to inflict on us now?
But, no, this is good news. The latest World Health Report, just out from the World Health Organization, reports:
If children were still dying at 1978 rates, there would have been 16.2 million deaths globally in 2006. In fact, there were only 9.5 million such deaths. This difference of 6.7 million is equivalent to 18,329 children’s lives being saved each day.
One of the reasons there isn’t more support for foreign aid is the glum sense that places like Africa are tragic but hopeless, that poor countries are so corrupt and inefficient that it’s impossible to register progress. The report is a good antidote to that defeatism. Sure, aid is often inefficient and occasionally counter-productive, but on the other hand saving 18,000 children’s lives each day is quite an extraordinary achievement.
