Among newborns around the world, there are high rates of infant mortality, According to UNICEF figures, there are about 2.9 million babies who die during their first month of life, of them one million does not even survive the first day. Hence the first 24 hours of life are the most dangerous in certain circumstances.
However, the number of deaths in children under five has fallen, but not with those affecting newborns, which represent a higher percentage than in 1990 (from 33 to 44 percent).
The former First Lady of South Africa (Graça Machel) has presented at the Strasbourg forum the 'Action Plan for all newborns', in order to address this gap in the global program for child survival
This Plan provides a clear roadmap on how to end the preventable deaths of newborns: promotes innovative ways to strengthen health sector strategies, describes standards to establish quality of care, and indicators to measure births and deaths.
It also includes programs to reach the most forgotten with universal health care, and establishes guidelines for accountability.
UNICEF says the measures promoted in the Action Plan for all newborns they can avoid more than 70% of the deaths that occur today. The key is to obtain the political commitment, and this is what the presentation of the plan and the celebration of the Forum have tried to generate.
Countries should take the initiative to ensure that these simple and proven measures to boost newborn survival are implemented locally. An essential element for this is ensure that governments include children in their indicators, especially to the little ones. The nearly 3 million newborns who die, and another 2.6 million who are born already dead, are generally absent in their countries' statistics.
Neither their births nor their deaths are recorded, and therefore there is very little accountability regarding their lives, and they are given very little attention when they die
