Alliance Jointly Hosts High Level Reception at Child Survival Summit
The Alliance, together with CORE Group, Frontline Health Workers Coalition, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the GAVI Alliance, the Global Coalition Against Childhood Pneumonia, Healthy Newborn Network, mHealth Alliance, the U.S. Coalition for Child Survival, WASH Network, and the White Ribbon Alliance, co-hosted an evening reception for delegates attending the Summit.
Cooking on open fires or rudimentary cookstoves causes harmful smoke that negatively impacts the health of nearly 3 billion people around the world, mostly women and children. Acute respiratory infections, including pneumonias, are among the most common health consequences of harmful smoke. Using a clean cookstove and fuels in the home can result in a 50% reduction in a child's risk of contracting pneumonia.
In addition, household air pollution has been linked to adverse pregnancy outcomes, including low birth weight and pre-term birth. Indeed, the recently released “Born Too Soon: A Global Action Report on Preterm Birth” from the Partnership on Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health (PMNCH) highlights indoor air pollution from cooking and solid fuels in the section on risk factors for premature birth.
Moreover, the Alliance's activities are directly in line with the main deliverables for this Summit. The Alliance is 1) an innovative initiative specifically targeting affordable, scalable innovations to advance child survival; 2) addresses supply side, demand side, and enabling environment related barriers with an emphasis on strengthening public, private, and government partnerships to encourage the universal adoption of clean cookstoves and fuels; and 3) addresses key technical issues by supporting targeted research and integrating impact modeling and measurement through a wide variety of partner activities.
For example, one of the Alliance strategies for spearheading the transformation of the cookstove sector is to foster an enabling environment, a premise that includes support towards evidence-based research. A few months ago, the Alliance launched a Request for Applications (RFA) on cookstoves and child survival research with a specific focus on adverse pregnancy outcomes (including low birth weight, pre-term birth, and birth defects) and acute respiratory illness, including pneumonia and other acute lower respiratory infections.
As much as $800,000 will be available for studies funded under this RFA. The Alliance received 18 full applications proposing research studies in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru, Uganda, Bangladesh, and China.
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