Last Tuesday night Bill and Melinda Gates launched the long-awaited Living Proof Project. As impatient optimists, the pair dazzled the audience with a combination of data, compelling videos, photographs and humor. Bill Gates described the most beautiful picture he had ever seen – a graph of declining child mortality in the last fifty years.
Melinda followed with success stories of maternal and child health, and a plea to tell at least one person not in the auditorium that "U.S. investments in health are working".
Defining themselves as impatient optimists, they discussed the millions of lives that have been saved, improved and empowered because of the investments in global health.
For example:
- the number of people who die annually of measles worldwide fell by 75 percent between 2000 and 2007
- polio cases worldwide have declined 99 percent in just twenty years
- the percentage of births that were attended by a skilled birth attendant increased from 47 percent in 1990 to 61 percent in 2006
- global coverage of key child immunizations has increased from less than 5 percent in 1974 to approximately 80 percent today
To watch the presentation, please view below. For individual videos, please click here.
Image courtesy Bisnow
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Categories: Humanitarian Aid, Maternal & Child Health, Measurement & Accountability, Multimedia
