At a clinic in Kenya, a woman recently grieved for her child as he gasped for his last breaths. A few miles away, a woman in another clinic sat by her son’s bedside and made joyful plans for his future schooling.
Melinda Gates speaks at the CARE Conference in Washington on Wednesday morning. (Photo by Rebecca Cohen / Medill News Service)
The difference between the two incidents was a 13-cent pneumonia vaccine, philanthropist Melinda Gates told a roomful of women’s rights advocates Wednesday at a conference to celebrate International Women’s Day.
“To a mother it’s the difference between a vigil over your dying baby and the chance of the beauty of a lifetime,” Gates said as she coached more than a thousand attendees of the CARE Conference on how to sell the issue of women’s and children’s health care when they head out to Capitol Hill for a scheduled day of lobbying Thursday.
This will not be an easy year to persuade politicians to spend money on women and children, Gates said.
However, she urged conference-goers to remind their representatives there are simple, proven ways to save children’s lives, including vaccines like the one for pneumonia.
Between 1960 and last year, innovations in nutrition and health care cut worldwide deaths among children under 5 from 20 million to 8.1 million, Gates said. She challenged the room to see how quickly they could halve the rate again.
“When we advocate, we have to remember to tell our story,” Gates said. “We’re not just haggling over a line item in a government budget, we’re talking about a life.”
Gates was not the only high-profile speaker at Wednesday’s conference. An afternoon panel on student involvement in global issues included former first daughter Barbara Bush, co-founder of Global Health Corps. Her twin sister Jenna chaired a panel on maternal healthcare in the room next door. Former first lady Barbara Bush is scheduled to speak tonight.
Getting young people involved in humanitarian issues such as women’s rights is the key to solving them, the younger Barbara Bush said. Her organization recruits recent college graduates up to age 30 to work in public health and provides them with leadership training.
“Our generation is super engaged in a lot of issues, and it would be a missed opportunity not to take advantage of that,” she said
