For the first time in history, we have the available knowledge and technologies to reach the world’s most marginalized children with life-saving interventions. By working together with renewed determination, we can save more children’s lives. To this end, UNICEF has established Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed - a global effort to accelerate action on maternal, newborn and child survival. Ending preventable maternal and child deaths means, first, giving children a healthy start by providing pregnant mothers with quality care and nutrition during pregnancy. It means giving newborns a safe delivery, the ability to breathe in the first crucial moments of life, and proper nourishment to avoid stunting. It means newborns are sheltered, breastfed, kept warm and shielded from diseases like HIV. And it means protecting children from infectious diseases like malaria and pneumonia with vaccines, bed nets, and antibiotics. UNICEF is supporting governments to reach the most vulnerable women and children with the highest impact interventions to save lives.

The 25th Team will be an important advocate for these efforts.

As of January 2015, the projects to be supported are:

Cambodia: The 25th Team will support a program in 2 provinces to ensure that mothers and newborns are properly nourished and to test new ways of improving the nutrition practices of pregnant women so that these efforts can be taken to scale by the government across the country.

Ethiopia: In Ethiopia only 10% of children are registered at birth. UNICEF, through the 25th Team, will put a system in place, using touch points in the health system to register children in one state. This experience will then be used to support the roll out a national birth registration system across the country.

Indonesia: Adolescent health and nutrition has been given very little attention in Indonesia. Through the 25th Team, UNICEF will design and model new programme approaches that more effectively reach adolescent girls with interventions to improve their health and nutritional status that can then be scaled-up with the government’s own resources.

Namibia: The 25th Team will support the regional governments of two northern regions to strengthen these health and birth registration services for children to demonstrate how to successfully improve access to services for vulnerable families and ensure that they can be maintained for the long term.

Peru: The 25th Team will support programming to improve the health of pregnant women and newborns in two parts of the Amazonian region. The program will compliment other work UNICEF is supporting with children under 5 and will provide evidence to the government to replicate and bring to scale in the region.