Specific goals are:
According to Save the Children, China and India account for the greatest number of the annual 4,000,000 children worldwide who die each year in the first 24 hours of life. The main challenges to health promotion in China are in the agricultural sector, particularly in China's west, where "...4.2 million children still live in poverty with little access to basic services such as health and education."
Today the top three killers in most poor countries, including China, are maternal death around childbirth and pediatric respiratory and intestinal infections leading to death from pulmonary failure or uncontrolled diarrhea. But few women's rights groups put safe pregnancy near the top of their list of priorities, and there is no dysentery lobby or celebrity attention given to coughing babies.
The best way to improve health and life expectancy is to focus on maternal and infant survival. Increasing the number and quality of rural caregivers is the principle weapon in fighting maternal and child mortality/morbidity.
Ignoring the needs of ultra-poor remote women is a factor in further marginalizing them. This project will help to realize the UN's Millennium Development Goal #3, Eliminating Gender Disparity at All Levels. According to the UN MDGs "deeply rooted gender inequity is the primary factor in lower health levels and opportunities to reach out of poverty."
Since 1992, in cooperation with the government of China, Surmang Foundation has operated a successful clinic in a remote part of China's ultra-poor catchment, the area where 30 million people earn less than ¥1/day. Since 1996, it has provided free medical care and free medicine to over 70,000 residents of the far-flung reaches of Surmang, Yushu Prefecture, Qinghai Province.
Save the Children, "State of the World's Mothers 2006"
Safe the Children UK, "Country Brief, China" 2004/2005
Laurie Garrett, The Challenge of Global Health, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007, Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health.
