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Currently 54 countries are off-track to achieving the SDG target for under-five mortality, and more will fall behind if we do not act with urgency. Against this grim reality, other countries have made tremendous progress in cutting back preventable under-five mortality showing that with determination and strong technical and political leadership, progress is possible. The Child Health Task Force is excited to announce its first virtual conference to unite child health partners around how we address health inequities to enable children across the globe and throughout the life course to survive and thrive.
Registration is now OPEN!
Join child health partners from around the world for a conversation on how we might address health inequities to enable children to survive and thrive. Hear from inspiring speakers and expert practitioners, including:
- Keynote speaker Dr. Atul Gawande, Assistant Administrator for Global Health, USAID
- Professor Lisine Tuyisenge, Rwanda Paediatric Association
- Professor Hadiza Galadanci, Africa Center of Excellence for Population Health and Policy, Bayero University Kano, Nigeria
- Dr Queen Dube, Ministry of Health Malawi
- Dr. Sangeeta Yadav, Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi
- Dr. Anshu Banerjee, WHO
- Dr. Lu Wei Pearson, UNICEF
Participate in concurrent sessions, skills building sessions, discussions, and poster presentations that explore the conference's themes. Register now at no cost to attend the conference.
Agenda At-A-Glance
The plenary, concurrent sessions, and virtual conference site will be available in French and English.
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Conference Objectives
- Identify key vulnerabilities and risk factors that perpetuate inequities in child health across the countries represented in the Task Force membership.
- Exchange promising and innovative programmatic and systems-strengthening solutions for reaching hard-to-reach children with lifesaving interventions.
- Share experiences, models, and frameworks for accountability, measuring, and evaluating progress in achieving child health equity.
- Gather inputs to develop recommendations for advocating for governments, global partners, and donors to commit to addressing inequities in child health through renewed energy and focus on child survival and wellbeing.
Thematic Tracks
Across the tracks, presentations will showcase research results, emerging evidence, tools, program approaches, partnerships, policy action, financing, successes, and implementation failures that will foster deep reflection, provoke dialogue and spur action to reach the unreached children.
1. Defining and identifying inequity
Children born in sub-Saharan Africa are 12 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than children in high-income countries, a statistic that has barely changed over the past 30 years. We know these inequities exist, but in order to address them, we need to define, understand and identify children who are affected, including those in humanitarian contexts, crisis and fragile settings, urban slums, rural areas, caste, and ethnic or religious minorities, etc.
2. Addressing inequities through strengthening Primary Health Care (PHC)
Despite intractable implementation challenges and limited funding, some countries have made tremendous progress in improving health outcomes. These countries have strengthened the critical elements of the PHC systems as an inclusive health system.
3. Measuring inequities, monitoring and tracking progress
A major challenge has been establishing sustainable, quality mechanisms for measuring inequities and tracking progress.
We invite any member of the Task Force who has original research or programmatic lessons to submit an abstract before April 7 2023 for the concurrent and skills-building sessions and before April 28 for the posters. Abstracts for all types of presentations should align with the overall theme of the conference – inequities in child health – and the objectives (above). The types of presentations include:
- Concurrent session (45 min) – 15-20 min oral presentation with 25-30 min discussion/Q&A, aligned to one of the tracks (see above)
- Skills-building event (90 min) – capacity building workshop focused on one of the following skills: proposal/grant writing, implementation research (designing a research question, data collection, analysis), manuscript writing, costing analysis, investment cases, financing, advocacy, resource mobilization
- Poster presentations – physical display prepared in advance and shared in one of the subgroup’s virtual booths. Posters must be aligned to one of the subgroup topics.
Please limit your abstract to 300 words or less. Include a title (maximum 25 words), speaker details (if appropriate), relevance to the conference objectives, and the track (for concurrent sessions), subgroup (for posters) or skill (for skills-building events) it would address. We are accepting abstracts in French and English.