You may have seen the UNICEF report that came out this week. What did you notice most about it? My wife read out bits of it from the newspaper at breakfast and she was just delighted. Can you believe this! she said:

the number of deaths of children under 5 decreased from around 12.5 million in 1990 to an estimated 8.8 million in 2008 – a 28 percent decline.

The number of children not attending primary school also dropped, from 115 million in 2002 to 101 million in 2007, the report said.

I said, great! I’ll blog about it, I like to write up good news. She said this was a result all but two of the nations of the world signing on to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Guess which two nations, she added with disgust: Somalia and the US. And guess why:

The Clinton administration signed the convention but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification because of opposition from groups that argued it infringed on the rights of parents and was inconsistent with state and local laws…

The convention ensures children of the right to a name, a nationality, an education, the highest possible standards of health, protection from abuse and exploitation, and the right to have their views heard.

So now I have to blog about how the Senate wants to hold out for parents’ rights to abuse their children.

So today I go looking for the article to write about it here. (This week I have been too mentally exhausted to blog much). But instead of the mostly good news article I expected, I find a bad news article. It starts:

UNICEF urged the world to help the 1 billion children still deprived of food, shelter, clean water or health care – and the hundreds of millions more threatened by violence – two decades after the U.N. adopted a treaty guaranteeing children’s rights.

… more than 24,000 children under the age of 5 die every day from preventable causes like pneumonia, malaria, measles and malnutrition. Nearly 200 million youngsters are chronically malnourished, more than 140 million are forced to work, and millions of girls and boys of all ages are subjected to sexual violence.

But then, we knew that already. What we didn’t know was that the number of deaths of children under 5 decreased from around 12.5 million in 1990 to an estimated 8.8 million in 2008 – a 28 percent decline. Or that 14 million more kids are going to primary school than were going just two years ago.

Kristof has a piece worth reading in the New York Times book review today, in which he talks about those who disparage all aid as useless, and those who say we need vast new amounts of aid. The truth is pragmatically in between, he says. Throwing money at poverty may only increase corruption, but funding well-thought-out programs that actually work makes a huge difference. Ones that work to increase school attendance include paying mothers for the days their kids are in school, and deworming children, which “costs about 50 cents per child per year and reduces absenteeism from anemia, sickness and malnutrition.” In his opinion,

… the number of children dying each year before the age of 5 has dropped by three million worldwide since 1990, largely because of foreign aid. Yes, aid often fails – but more than balancing the failures is quite a triumph: one child’s life saved every 11 seconds (according to my calculations from United Nations statistics).

Sometimes quoting that figure of 24,000 children dying unnecessarily every year just makes the problem seem so overwhelming we get locked in stasis. Or we imagine that only a vast revolution will be needed before anything can change. But knowing that — even with our currently low level of popular commitment in rich countries to ending world poverty — those numbers have declined by 28% in 18 years: that’s encouraging. If there had been a revolution those numbers would be touted as a great success. That report makes it feel like all the efforts of many, many people — and if you are reading this you may very likely be among their number — have born some fruit! We don’t have to wait for everything to change before anything changes.

If this news buoys us up and we share it with our neighbors and families we will probably increase our efforts. And if we make it clear to our government that we expect them to ramp up our collective efforts in addition to whatever we can give personally through nonprofits and private microfinance schemes like Kiva and however we have worked out we can help best, then we can make faster progress. After all, Obama is on record wanting to endorse this Convention and to do more on world poverty: he may just be waiting for the groundswell to push his in that direction. This is the idea of promoting a Global Marshall Plan as the centerpiece of US foreign policy. It may look Utopian today, but it can start to shift the debate so people see that Generosity, not Domination or Global Policeman, can be the key concept driving US foreign policy.

Anyway, at Thanksgiving, I’m going to give thanks that the deaths of kids under 5 have declined by 28% in 18 years. That is an extraordinary thing to give thanks for.