Question 1
UNICEF is an arm of the United Nations with headquarters in the New York City which is involved in the provision of developmental and humanitarian help to mothers and children in the developing countries. Most of UNICEF’s work is field-based and has staff in close to 200 nations. Over 200 national offices perform the mission’s work in through collaborative programs with the host nations. Most of the work by UNICEF is performed in New York, especially administration and management. The supply division is in Denmark, in the city of Copenhagen and distributes antiretroviral drugs and vaccines for children and women suffering from HIV. They also distribute nutritional supplements, arrange for emergency shelters and gives educational supplies.
Question 2
The issue of poverty and child health has been a very unfortunate issue. It is noteworthy that great milestones have been made and are in progress in the field of pediatric health. Children born in South America or Central America had about 11 percent risk of dying in the mid - 1900s before their first birthday were celebrated. However, by the close of the 20th century there was an improvement by about 19 percent. There has been an inequitable progress though. One pattern which is recurrent in the statistics on child health is that the children from the poor neighborhoods or countries fall way behind their peers in the developed countries.
Question 3
How to evaluate the effectiveness of the programs
The centrality of the need to show impacts of programs necessitates the prioritization of evaluation activities so as to be part of the program from the beginning. If the least is to be said, the event of evaluation should be inclusive of monitoring of performance. The program should be involved in both the collection and analysis of the information regarding the progress of the program. This helps develop the capacity of the program to be self – evaluated for continuity. Additionally, performance monitoring may be performed through analysis of client surveys and programs records. This may be undertaken by the staff who have a bearing on research, but may also be performed through an outside evaluator. No matter, technical support and training would be needed in each of the cases in order to ensure that the quality of data is preserved and the findings are properly processed and evaluated.
It is important for the leader to plan for the evaluation at every level, be it program staff, the community, the leaders of the agencies or even the sponsor of the program. All the members involved at such levels have some stake in the outcome of the program and should be involved from the planning stage. Each party should be able to clearly see the benefits of the results.Question 4
Carra Dar( 2008) states regarding the health sector that differences in the spending capacities of governments in healthcare, the amount of resources dedicated to research and ease of access technology and the level of technological advancement are the major contributors to the disparities seen in the healthcare system. Low and middle income countries are account for a significant chunk of healthcare spending. Such countries not only carry over three quarters of the world’s population but also have the heaviest world disease burden (WHO, 2009)
While health spending in the developing countries is approximately $ 11 per individual per year, the corresponding spending in the developed countries is $ 1900 per individual per year, the average WHO approximation that covers the basic needs is between $ 30 and $ 40 per individual per year.
Diseases that are common in the developing countries have attracted minimum research and spending. The market forces are not in favor of the development of medicines that would be predominantly used by the developing countries. An example is the case of malaria where one study reported that the funding for malaria research in 1990 was $ 65 for every fatal case of the disease as compared with $ 789 for fatalities resulting from asthma. Between 1997 way back to 1975 out of the 1233 drugs that were developed globally, only 13 were relevant to the tropical infectious diseases( Anderson, 2009).
In recent years though, initiatives have been robust, for example the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization that has promoted the development of research on diseases that affect the developing countries. However, as it stands only a small proportion of the funds allocated for research and development is used for research on the diseases that affect ninety percent of the world’s population( Gwatkin et al, 2009).
References
Anderson, Joe et al., (2009) Malaria Research: An Audit of International Activity PRISM Report
No. 7 London: The Wellcome Trust, Unit for Policy Research in Science and Medicine: 29
Darra, Cara( 2008 )Improving the Health of the World’s Poorest People
Gwatkin DR, Guillot M, Heuveline P. ( 2009)The burden of disease among the global poor.
Lancet. 354:586–589.
