The recent launch of Amaara, New Delhi's first human milk bank, has been greeted with much cheering. The initiative endorses the long-term goal of reducing infant mortality and addresses the critical issue of lack of mothers' milk for physically fragile newborns in India's capital city.
The progress that Latin America has made in reducing child mortality is cited by international institutions as an example to be followed, and the region has met the fourth Millennium Development Goal, which is to cut the under-five mortality rate by two thirds.
It’s called the urban survival gap – fuelled by the growing inequality between rich and poor in both developing and developed countries – and it literally determines whether millions of infants will live or die before their fifth birthday.
As the international community marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, one question worthy of some reflection is: Is world population better or worse off demographically since the establishment of the U.N.?
Every year, three million newborn babies and almost 6.6 million children under five die globally, but if the rest of the world looked towards the examples of two of Africa's least-developed countries (LDCs), Rwanda and Ethiopia, they would perhaps be able to save these children.
The story goes like this: a young mother lies quietly in a dimly lit room having just given birth to her baby. For the next seven days she watches over the child with caution, nursing and swaddling it patiently. Fearful that the infant will not survive past a few days, she refuses to give it a name.