Over 41 million children in 50 countries throughout the world, including the United States, are benefiting from Save the Children’s programs in health, education, economic opportunities, emergency assistance and protection. Yet we know we can do more, and have undertaken the most ambitious goal in our 75-year history: to more than double the number of children we reach by 2012. To do so, we have created four overarching strategies: continue developing proven and replicable solutions to children’s urgent and long-term needs; advocate and mobilize people, governments and other agencies worldwide to improve programs and policies that impact children; support the implementation of those programs and policies; and at every level, starting in the communities where we work, create a global will to make lasting, positive change for children. We also have defined four Priority Results to achieve our intended impact: children are protected, children learn and develop; children are healthy and well-nourished; and children have food-secure and economically viable households.

We are pleased to share highlights of our work and results for children in the first half of our Fiscal Year 2008, which began October 1, 2007 and ends on September 30, 2008. These exciting initiatives are made possible by our combining and leveraging restricted public funds with essential private funds to drive on the-ground activities and support them with expert staff, technical assistance, training, program design, research, development, implementation and assessment, global advocacy for vulnerable children and efficient communications systems and technologies.

Priority Result 1: Children Are Protected Save the Children responds when emergencies put the survival, protection and well-being of children at risk. Our emergency response teams provide children and their families with essentials such as food, medicine, materials for shelter, and safe drinking water. We also address children’s unique needs during crises, including reunification with families and ensuring the continuity of school.

In the first half of our fiscal year, Save the Children responded to children involved in nine international emergencies, seven of which were due to natural disasters including:

● Flooding in Bolivia, Mozambique and Mexico. ● An unusually harsh winter in Tajikistan. ● Cyclones in Bangladesh and Mozambique.

CREATING LASTING CHANGE FOR CHILDREN IN NEED

Save the Children’s Program Highlights: April 2008

We also help communities prepare for the next disaster. For several years prior to last fall’s Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh, Save the Children had conducted emergency preparedness work that included “cyclone simulations” involving up to 10,000 people in coastal areas; our work and that of others helped save thousands of lives through early evacuations before the storm. Our emergency assistance also reaches children in war-torn countries and conflict areas. Within the first half of the fiscal year we provided assistance to children in:

● Sudan’s West Darfur State, where we are the largest organization providing ongoing relief assistance for up to 500,000 displaced children and women each month as security conditions allow.

● Chad and Jordan, where refugee children and families live in camps. ● Kenya, where violence erupted after the disputed December elections and families fled their homes.

Emergencies frequently separate children from their families and communities, making them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Save the Children helps protect children in 19 countries where these risks run high, including the risks of child trafficking in El Salvador and Indonesia; child labor in Vietnam and Tajikistan; and child soldier recruitment in Sudan and Nepal.

When emergencies strike in the United States, children’s needs for safety, protection and emotional recovery are often overlooked. Save the Children’s Domestic Emergency Unit (DEU) helps children and communities prepare for disasters, responds to emergencies, and works through partnerships and advocacy to ensure that children’s needs are addressed. Our disaster response teams create Safe Spaces -- safe places where children can play and recover after emergencies. We also help to restore services such as childcare and afterschool programs, offer programs which help children and caregivers regain a sense of safety and normalcy after disasters and build coping skills. Within the first half of this fiscal year, our domestic disaster unit assisted children in:

● Southern California in response to devastating wildfires in late 2007 which destroyed nearly 2,000 homes. Over 12,000 children and caregivers were reached through our Safe Spaces programs in shelters and at community centers, child care restoration programs, and our signature resilience-building programs in schools. ● Tennessee and Arkansas where, in the wake of tornadoes, we are helping child care facilities restore programs and replace learning and play materials which were lost. ● The Gulf Coast by offering psychosocial programs to children and care givers affected by Hurricane

Katrina so that they could regain a sense of normalcy. Save the Children is also building two state-of-the-art child care facilities in communities that had experienced the most severe destruction.

Our Domestic Emergency Unit works with policymakers and other child-focused organizations to ensure that children’s needs are integral to national, state and local emergency response plans. Save the Children serves as the

Biscuits are moved to a distribution center overseen by Save the Children in the village of Senerhat in Bangladesh on November 19, 2007. Relief workers rushed basic aid to areas most affected by Cyclone Sidr.

voice of children on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Advisory Committee and we successfully advocated for the introduction and passage of legislation to create a federal commission on children in disasters. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, we are piloting new child-focused emergency preparedness initiatives in flood-and tornado prone communities, and are continuing to work with national partners such as the American Red Cross, Children’s Disaster Services, and the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies to make Safe Spaces available in emergency evacuation shelters.

Priority Result 2: Children Learn and Develop Despite a pledge by 164 governments to achieve Education for All by 2015, some 72 million children still lack access to basic education, and more than 50 percent of countries do not equally enroll boys and girls. The promise of education falls shortest in countries affected by conflict, where a third of children are out of school. Education offers children and communities a way out of poverty and conflict. Save the Children targets the most vulnerable children in 35 countries, increasing the capacity of communities and parents to provide high quality, age-appropriate education for their children, from birth through young adulthood. High quality early childhood programs have a clear impact on later success in school and in life. These programs continue to be scarce, however, across sub-Saharan Africa. To ensure that children in this region receive the benefits of pre-primary education, Save the Children has developed innovative and comprehensive new early childhood education initiatives in:

● Mozambique, where we work with communities to construct and manage community-based preschools. Our comprehensive curriculum promotes physical, social, emotional and cognitive development for young children. ● El Salvador, where we work closely with local providers of nutrition and health services, making the delivery of early childhood development economical.

Through the Rewrite the Future initiative, Save the Children-U.S. and other members of the International Save the Children Alliance are improving access to quality education for children in countries affected by violence. Schools offer protection and a sense of normalcy during conflict, and prepare children to participate in their communities once peace is achieved. We have supported continued schooling for children in:

● Jordan, where we provide remedial class instruction, psychosocial support, and school supplies to refugee children from Iraq. ● Haiti, where we are increasing both access to and quality of education through teacher training, lending libraries, and provision of culturally appropriate textbooks. ● Sudan, where we are constructing schools and classrooms, training teachers, and providing teacher aids and materials.

We are providing children in some of America’s poorest and most remote communities with the resources they need to succeed academically and live healthy, active and productive lives. The hallmark of our rural literacy initiative is the Literacy Block, which consists of an hour of activities that support increased reading achievement including guided independent reading practice, fluency-building support and listening to books read aloud. We work in partnership with local schools and community-based organizations to provide children in kindergarten through eighth grade with the opportunity to increase their reading achievement by supplying the tools they need to develop reading skills and the guidance and support they need to grow as readers.

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Our Early Steps to School Success program is also supporting the development and school readiness of U.S. children through partnerships with their parents and other caregivers, and ongoing training to community educators. The program assists children with language, social and emotional development; equips parents with the skills and knowledge to successfully support their child’s growth; and develops strong home-school connections. Within the current fiscal year Save the Children is partnering with First Steps to fund three additional sites in rural South Carolina.

Priority Result 3: Children Are Healthy and Well-Nourished In thousands of poor communities worldwide, Save the Children is improving the health and nutritional status of pregnant women, newborns, young children and adolescents. We are expanding access to quality healthcare services and supplies as well as informing and influencing national health policies. Save the Children is expanding health services in Vietnam by working with partners in three provinces to improve care for mothers and their newborns in communities, health centers, district and provincial hospitals. We are also collaborating with the government to develop a national policy on newborn health. Our Adolescent Health programs seek to ensure access to reproductive health services in over 12 countries. In the first half of this fiscal year, Save the Children reached young women and men in:

● Malawi, Ethiopia and Bolivia, where young people receive information about healthy life choices from health care providers trained by Save the Children. ● The Philippines, where we strengthened a national

network of health clinics to help ensure the provision of quality health services for youth.

● Republic of Georgia, as the Ministry of Education adopted our Healthy Lifestyles curriculum, which instructs youth in reproductive health and life skills.

Save the Children is addressing the health and protection needs of children in high HIV-prevalence settings. With approximately 50 percent of all new HIV infections occurring within the 15-24 age group, we are assisting local communities in building their capacity to provide care, support and protection to children orphaned by or otherwise made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS, their families, and caregivers. Within the first half of the current fiscal year Save the Children:

● Helped meet the educational, livelihood, psychosocial, nutritional, health and HIV/AIDS prevention needs of nearly 140,000 orphans and vulnerable children in Mozambique and Ethiopia through our Scale-Up Hope program. ● Is continuing the five-year Positive Change: Children, Communities, and Care program in Ethiopia, an effort among a consortium of international and local organizations to address the needs of 500,000 orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV/AIDS. To date the project has reached over 300,000 orphans and vulnerable children through support of educational programs, establishment of 200 community savings and self-help groups, and support for vocational training to older orphans and vulnerable children. We have assisted in developing national level quality standards for care of orphans and vulnerable children and have addressed the nutritional needs of over 1,700 HIV-positive children. ● Worked to increase the adoption of risk reduction practices and education among young men and women in Vietnam and Bangladesh. ● Supported Voluntary Counseling and Testing programs by providing training to health service providers and peer counselors in Myanmar and the Philippines.

In Bolivia, young women receive helpful information about making wise reproductive choices.

In 18 countries, Save the Children’s School Health and Nutrition program addresses the critical health and nutrition factors which determine children’s school attendance and ability to learn. Ridding children of parasites, addressing nutritional deficiencies, treating malaria, and screening for vision and hearing all contribute to keeping children in school longer, attending more regularly, learning better, and growing into healthier and more productive adults. Health education which emphasizes life skills improves knowledge and changes behaviors that help keep children healthy and safe for life. Save the Children has introduced new school health interventions in Indonesia, Sudan and South Sudan. We have also helped children in:

● Burkina Faso receive Vitamin-A supplements and treatment for parasites under the government’s National School Health and Nutrition program. ● Mozambique, Mali and Sudan gain access to clean water and latrines at schools.

Also in Mali, our Child Health & Nutrition program is focusing on treating malaria by partnering with the Ministry of Health to distribute drug kits in local communities. Nearly 10 million children die each year before reaching age 5 and 60 percent of these deaths could be prevented using proven, low-cost interventions. Save the Children’s global child survival effort, Survive to 5, advocates for the right of every child to access basic preventative and curative health care which will dramatically increase their chances of surviving. Survive to 5 mobilizes policymakers, community groups, students and the media to discuss the need for basic health care, and to advocate for increased funding to train community health workers to help parents protect their children from such preventable or treatable causes of death as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, measles and complications relating to childbirth.

We are pleased to report that within the first half of the fiscal year: ● Senator Bill Frist, MD, a Save the Children trustee, submitted an op-ed article in the Washington Times encouraging support for the Global Child Survival Act, a bill which provides cost-effective and low- tech services like vaccinations, antibiotics, and simple mixtures to treat dehydration of children in countries where the need is greatest.

● Senator Bill Bradley joined the campaign.

● Actress Jessica Lange became our celebrity spokeswoman and traveled to Ethiopia to meet with our child survival staff.

Save the Children is also focusing attention on

saving the lives of the world’s most vulnerable children—newborns. Our Saving Newborn Lives program helps to prevent infant mortality in 18 countries. We assist mothers in providing basic care for their newborns, introduce effective models for saving low birth weight and preterm babies at health care centers, and advocate for newborn health programs within government agendas. Earlier this year:

● Health professionals from Tanzania and Mozambique visited Malawi’s Kangaroo Mother Care Learning Center, which Save the Children established in 2002. Some 1,000 grandmothers were also trained to provide basic care for newborns. ● Save the Children helped organize an international neonatal forum where participants agreed to prioritize newborn health in Bangladesh and newborn health experts came to consensus on

Senator Bill Frist, MD, a Save the Children trustee, traveled to Bangladesh to visit a community-wide vaccination program for children and their mothers as part of Survive to 5’s effort to reduce global child mortality.

recommendations for reducing birth asphyxia, one of the three main newborn killers. ● In Pakistan, we created a newborn care manual which was adopted by the Ministry of Health, colleges, bilateral and multilateral agencies and other nongovernment organizations.

Save the Children is also helping U.S. children strengthen their academic performance and reading scores through improved nutrition and physical activity. Our CHANGE program (Creating Healthy, Active & Nurturing Growing-up Environments) helps increase access to and promotes physical activity and healthy diets at school, in afterschool and summer programs, at home and in the community—all of which contribute to increasing a child’s ability to function and concentrate at school. The CHANGE program:

● Will be active at 90 model afterschool and summer program sites in 11 states within the 2007-08 program year. ● Integrates a successful model of physical activity curriculum

called CATCH (Coordinated Approach to Child Health) that teaches lifelong movement skills that combine fun and fitness.

Priority Result 4: Children Thrive in Food Secure and Economically Viable Households When families have enough food and are economically viable, their children are more likely to be healthy and well-nourished, better able to succeed in school and better protected from harmful environments. Save the Children uses its global network of partners and the support of donors to bring poverty-reducing innovations to poor families. We assist families in securing food, producing more profitable agricultural products, growing and protecting their assets and savings, and generating more income. Save the Children has also long supported the growth of microfinance institutions serving poor women microentrepreneurs and has linked these organizations to its Economic Opportunities Network. The Network now provides financial services to more than 600,000 families and benefits more than 2 million children in 22 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Central Asia. During the first half of the fiscal year, we expanded the Network to include financial and non-financial service providers in hard-to-reach, underserved, or politically fragile regions. New projects reflected our understanding that poor families have diverse and complex financial needs beyond access to credit. They included:

● Developing safe, flexible and reliable savings accounts for adolescent girls in Bangladesh and Malawi. ● Testing financial products that can be “layered” on existing health services already offered to families in

Egypt and Myanmar. ● Improving Moroccan youths’ money management skills and access to financial services. ● Piloting business development services through “value chains” to farmers and financial services to youth in Uganda.

Save the Children supports afterschool programs in some of America’s poorest communities, where children learn the importance of physical activity and nutrition.

In regions where chronic or extreme food shortages occur, we reach severely malnourished children and help families and communities develop the capacity to resolve their food supply needs over the longer term. Our programs improve agricultural productivity, educate households about nutrition, and provide food relief during crises. In the first half of this fiscal year, we reached children in:

● Central Asia, where poor harvests over the past two years have greatly inflated food prices. ● Nicaragua, where our food security program

increases families’ agricultural productivity and profitability, provides greater access to safe drinking water and sanitation and improves child nutrition. Through these measures, the number of children with stunted growth in the project area has declined from 22.4 percent in 2002 to 9.6 percent.

● Ethiopia, where our Productive Safety Net Program was piloted to test strategies for strengthening family livelihoods in pastoral areas.

The depth and breadth of Save the Children's work in 13 U.S. states and over 50 developing nations is made possible through the extraordinary support and trust of our global donor family. Throughout the second half of this fiscal year, we will sustain the vital initiatives described above and remain ready to respond when crises jeopardize children's lives and well-being. And, in this first full year of our five-year strategic plan, we will continue to build the momentum for creating change for children on a truly global scale. We are profoundly grateful to our donor family for sharing our hopes and aspirations for children in need.

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A nine-year-old boy holds a basket of maca roots, which his family grows as part of a food security program in Bolivia.