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According to an Ethiopian Health Ministry report called, “Health and Health-Related Indicators,” over 50% of the country’s children are suffering from stunted growth. One in 10 children is “wasted,” and five in 10 suffer from poor diet and malnutrition, leaving them very underweight. The babies of Ethiopia are more likely to die before they are five years old than the children of any other country in the world.

The head of health and nutrition at UNICEF, Vivian Vansteirteghem, has said that the UN and the Ethiopian government are setting in motion a huge government-led health program to improve the health of Ethiopia’s children.

28,000 health workers are being trained over the next five years to work in this health program, and some of the national strategies include: the promotion of breast-feeding, a wide reaching immunization program, and efficient treatment of illnesses like pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria, all easily curable in the west. Vansteirteghem pointed out that these three goals address three main reasons for child mortality.

UNICEF, the Health Ministry, and the World Food Program are working to reach over 6.8 Ethiopian children all over the country. Through the Enhanced Outreach Strategy, the three groups offer measles vaccinations (measles is a common killer of children in Africa), de-worming, vitamin A, and nutritional screening to all the children.

With an annual budget of $135 million, Ethiopia’s Health Ministry has reported that there are only 126 hospitals and 2,000 doctors in Ethiopia. The country has a population of over 71 million people. The government needs close to $13 billion over the next ten years to even try and meet the world health targets set by the UN.

Ethiopia’s public health system can only provide the most basic services to about 64% of the population. According to the ministry’s report, much of the rural population has almost no access to modern health care. That leads to the failure of the health-care delivery system to react to the needs of the citizenry.

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