CHILDREN FOR HEALTH CELEBRATES ITS FIRST BIRTHDAY!

We find it incredible that ONE YEAR has passed since we launched Children for Health at the National Theatre in London on 7^th March 2013. And what a year it has been!

Here is a short report on what we have been up to – in case you have not checked our blogs, or not checked your Facebook messages, or diverted our emails to your junk box, or muffled our tweets…

Well, we never imagined it would take so long to get our (excellent, splendid, well-intentioned) organisation registered with the Charity Commission. We took several (frustrating, arduous, head-banging) months proving we are not money-launderers (we are not)… and an even longer time navigating the complicated but important distinction between the Advancement of Education and the Advancement of Health. We are a charity whose objects are categorised primarily as for the Advancement of Education (because health education is education, right?)… but our ultimate objective is the Advancement of Health (because that is what health education brings, right?). So you can imagine what a kerfuffle that caused.

Thanks to the kind and diligent folks at the CC, we managed to sort all this out and, in July 2013, we were officially registered… 1153028 is our number and Children for Health is our name!

Phew! That would have been a real blow if it hadn’t worked out. But it did. Fund-raising without a place to put funds raised is like clapping with one hand. We are, and continue to be, very grateful to ARM who have ridden this storm with us, and provided seed funding and support in advance of (and since) our formal registration. Dominic Vergine is our key person at ARM, Director of Sustainable Development; here’s a picture of him at our launch last year, so you can thank him personally when you bump into him in Cambridge High Street:

Our next target was to approach GSK. Some of you may know that we have close ties to GSK here at Children for Health. Clare Hanbury (CfH Founder) and Tobias Hanbury (CfH Board Chairman) are both children of the late Peter Francis Gerard Hanbury, who worked his entire career at Allen & Hanburys and then at Glaxo after they acquired A&H in 1958. GSK were very complementary about the work we are doing, but like many large multinationals, like to focus their CSR activities and funds on a few global alliances (like Save the Children) rather than impetuous start-ups (like Children for Health). We left on good terms and promised them we would come back and knock on their door again when we were more grown-up.

Luckily for us, a man called Dr. Sam Agbo, Head of Health & HIV at Save the Children, came to our launch party last March. He loved our mission and understood that CfH could complement the work that Save is doing in many parts of the world. Just less than a year later, after many rounds of discussions and meetings, we are delighted to announce that Children for Health has recently completed a ‘memorandum of understanding’ with Save the Children, to help provide technical support and advice on children’s participation in health to many of their “signature” programmes as and when needed and relevant. We would like to acknowledge here the determination and commitment of our friends at Save the Children: Sam Agbo, Zaeem Ul Haq and Paula Valentine who have made all this possible! This thumbs up gives us credibility and confidence. We are growing up very fast!

In one of those heart-warming coincidences, it turns out that Sue Allchurch, one of Tobias’s great friends at University, has recently become the Global Director of Communications & Marketing for Save the Children, and Sue is now helping us jointly to communicate our new partnership.

So that’s the news on the partnership side. What about actual activities at field level? Progress has been equally dramatic. Given that we are a small organisation, we decided initially to focus our time and resources helping with a flagship programme which was (i) funded (ii) relevant and (iii) scalable. The programme that came our way was the CPLAN (Children’s Participation in Learning & Action in Nutrition) initiative in Mozambique: a government-led pilot programme to develop the engagement and participation of children to help solve the problem of childhood stunting caused by under-nutrition. The project is funded by DANIDA (the Danish Government’s international aid organisation) who engaged CfH to lead the training events and to develop materials (Resource Manual and a Training Guide) and other tools to assist with implementation and monitoring. Children for Health also has expertise in the use of mobile for development and we are planning to monitor outputs using mobile applications as the programme matures. Discussions are also under-way for Children for Health to provide a training of trainers event, set up a ‘demonstration school’ and to be a mentor to the provincial and local teams to develop capacity.  After the pilot programme, the programme will be scaled to other districts and provinces in Mozambique.

Here are some photos of Clare in action: