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The State of the World’s Children 2015: Reimagine the future

Page 21

Workin Comm

MOHAMED BANGURA, young inventor, tells of inventing a low-cost sharpening machine for his community’s craftsmen after noticing that the tools they used would regularly wear out. Mohamed put himself in their shoes, imagining how he would feel if the circuit boards he needed to pursue his passion for building electronics were always breaking down. He developed his machine in close consultation with the craftsmen, and seeing them use the finished product boosted his confidence in his own abilities to create solutions.

STEVE COLLINS, Co-Founder and Director of Valid Nutrition, discusses his pioneering development of the community-based management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) – a model of care that moved away from the traditional, expensive and low-coverage model of inpatient therapeutic feeding centres run by aid agencies, to treating people in their homes with the support of local clinics and using ready-to-use therapeutic foods. By empowering parents with the tools to care for their own children, CMAM revolutionized the treatment of acute malnutrition. KAREN MACOURS, Associate Professor at the Paris School of Economics and Researcher at the French Agricultural Research Institute, surveys innovative conditional cash transfer programmes that bypass the traditional supply-side approach focusing on service provision, to instead address the demand side by providing families in poor and vulnerable communities with cash in exchange for changes in nutrition- and health-related behaviours. Such social protection initiatives empower families to invest in their own children. And they work: rigorous, randomized evaluations have shown that they produce sustained improvements in young children’s cognitive development.

Fostering an environment that promotes the use of evidence and transparency to provoke change is an important challenge to which we must all rise.

– Steve Collins

OLIVIER NYIRUBUGARA, Lecturer in Journalism and New Media at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Senior Coach at the Voices of Africa Media Foundation, discusses his experience training young people in eight African countries to use mobile phones to produce audiovisual reports about issues that undermine the realization of children’s rights – from child labour to violence to lack of access to quality education. The young reporters show the videos to local administrators and decision makers, voicing their concerns and trying to find solutions. Voices of Africa also trains them in journalistic ethics – especially regarding any potential risks to the children featured in their stories.

Reimagine the future: Innovation for every child

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