We see tomorrow in today’s child

Action on the ground
Growing up
Healthy
Ensuring healthy growth and development of children
is an imperative. Save the Children exposes children
to healthier ways of living through activity, nutrition
lessons and balanced food choices so they can be
healthy and active in both learning and life.
Save the Children is committed to
ensuring that all children get access to
free essential healthcare and grow up
healthy to exploit their full potential.
The journey of newborns in India is filled
with uncertainties. India has the highest
number of newborn deaths, many of whom
do not survive the very first day of their
lives. Over 3,00,000 children die in India on
the 1st day of birth and more than 7 lakh
in their 1st month. Most of these deaths
are caused due to preventable diseases
such as malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia and
malnutrition can be prevented by simple and
economical methods of preventive care that
can be accessed by all young mothers and
their newborns.
Our interventions are focused on
maternal, newborn and child health,
nutrition, adolescent health and
reproductive health with special focus on
those coming from the most disadvantaged
communities.
Thanks to the generous contributions
from our supporters in 2015, we were able
to save 115,037 newborn lives through our
various programmes, 34,326 children from
malnutrition and trained over 2,000 health
workers.
Saving the Newborns
Save the Children finds it imperative that
all efforts are made to educate health
personnel and the communities at large
to improve newborn health and reduce
death among newborns through providing
appropriate home based care. With these
objective in mind, Save the Children in
partnership with Graham and Susan Tobbell
developed a programme “Helping to save
the lives of Newborns” which seeks to work
intensively with frontline health workers,
community based groups, mothers and
newborns to bridge the gap between service
Children have the right to
survive and thrive regardless of
where they are born.
and practice of Home Based Newborn
Care (HBNC) on the ground among
rural populations. The project works to
strengthen existing community groups, and
build up the referral system that links these
health workers to formal level health care
systems.
The project intervention has shown
encouraging signs of change at the ground
level. The project has been successful in
spreading awareness and education among
the target community on health issues
primarily pertaining to newborn care.
Capacity building inputs have increased
the efficiency of frontline health workers.
This has resulted in increased access to
health services and improvement in health
indicators.
As the demand for health services has
increased, the need now is to focus on
health systems and to make it effective
and accountable to respond to target
community’s needs.
Direct beneficiaries reached so far:
• 48,177 pregnant and lactating women
• 16,413 men
• 38,559 children under the age of two have
benefited over the project period
Indirect beneficiaries reached so far:
• 235,386 adults and children have indirectly
benefited from the work of the project over
26 Save the children annual report 27