Every person should have equal opportunity to lead a safe, healthy, and productive life

Every person should have an equal opportunity to lead a safe, healthy, and productive life. Every disadvantage that many people face makes their life-journey harder.  For a girl born in the Chad, Yemen, or Myanmar, achieving a safe, healthy, and productive life requires overcoming challenge after challenge after challenge.

Child mortality, poor quality education, gender discrimination and many other disadvantages do not need to pile up on top of one another to make life hard, but when they do, the effect is terrible.  Few countries are expected to meet the Health and Education SDGs by 2030.  Many communities will not reach the required goals before 2050.  Geographic equality is huge and it occurs globally, and within countries.  Where you are born is the biggest determinant of whether you will reach your full human capital.  Children in Yemen, Syria, DRC, Mozambique, and Bangladesh deserve the same opportunities as children born in Australia and Norway.

What is life like for millions of young girls around the world? The data says these girls have probably been close to starving to death several times. The odds are that they did not get the nutrients their bodies and brains needed to develop fully. It is likely that millions of these girls never got the opportunity to learn to read and write, and too many of these girls will get pregnant well before they turns 18, even though their bodies will not be ready for childbirth.  And when the time comes, there is a good chance these girls will give birth alone and without any qualified support.  These girls spread across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia deserve a better life.

Being born a female is another huge hurdle and gender inequality remains an avoidable and significant problem in nearly every country.  If you are born a girl and in a poor country your challenges are even more significant.  In many countries, the divergence between their realization of human potential, human capacity, human security, and human rights diverges significantly during adolescence when many boys obtain more freedoms and have more influence over their lives, and at the same time, this is when many girls around the world lose freedoms including ability to access education, to play, and must take an increasing amount of duties including working, cooking, cleaning, raising children, and too often getting married and having their own children.  Twenty one percent of girls are married before they are 18 years old. On average, women spent three times longer on unpaid care work than males, and there remains a 26 percent gender gap in the workforce and labour participation.  The lack of access to education and increasing burdens is negative for everyone. Limiting children’s opportunities, diminishing education attainment, and reducing economic empowerment is destructive for all.

We know that the longer our children receive quality education, the better their jobs will likely be.  Education must be complimented by sustained behaviour change that removes discrimination and cultural norms that disempower women and disadvantage women’s access to high-quality and well-paid employment.

At the same time, access to quality primary health care must be available for everyone.  Universal primary health care for all people should not even require explanation or debate in 2019 – but it remains a dream for millions.  An essential component of every primary health care unit should also be a functioning, equipped, and paid community health worker scheme that can reach out to the most disadvantaged, discriminated, and vulnerable members of community.  Countries that have invested in sound community health worker schemes include Ethiopia and Rwanda and they are now considered leaders in reducing childhood morbidity.  As we saw in Bangladesh during the influx of nearly one million Rohingya refugees, the rapid mobilisation and training of a strong community health worker cadre ensured that the sick and health received health education, hygiene promotion messages, and rapid referral to appropriate health care providers.  Community health workers also facilitated improved health seeking behaviour and resulted in increased utilization of health care services.  More can and should be done to ensure all children , regardless of where they are born,  to ensure they lead healthy, productive, and safe lives.