Red Nose Day: Four Ways We’re Winning the Fight Against Child Poverty

May 25, 2016 By Miriam Smallman

Wearing a red nose is a bold fashion choice. It’s silly. It makes you laugh.

But that’s the point of Red Nose Day, a charity event on May 26 committed to raising awareness for ending child poverty.

“Sharing a laugh brings people together,” explains the Red Nose Day website. “Wearing a Red Nose is a way to create moments of special human connection. Red Nose Day is all about bringing people together to care for each other.”

Here’s how some of Red Nose Day’s charity partners—and USGLC members—are working to help end child poverty.

Save the Children and Oxfam America

True to its name, Save the Children works in the areas of health, education, hunger and child protection to give children a healthy and safe start to life. In 2015, Save the Children used funds raised during Red Nose Day to implement early childhood literacy programs in Bhutan, as well as education and child protection programs in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. They were also able to use those dollars raised to assist child and family recovery after last year’s earthquakes in Nepal.

Oxfam America, also a humanitarian NGO, envisions “a just world without poverty.”  To this end, they’ve worked on projects including the food crisis in South Sudan, Syrian refugees, Ebola, and the Nepal earthquakes. “We can be the first generation to end extreme poverty and hunger,” says Oxfam America President Raymond Offenheiser. “But we all have to take responsibility for making this happen.”

Gavi and the Global Fund

When children are bedridden and hospitalized by illness, they lose precious time that could otherwise be spent in school getting an education — and it’s all the more tragic when the illness is preventable. This is where Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Global Fund come in. Gavi aims to create access to vaccines for children in some of the world’s poorest countries and has helped immunize more than 500 million children since 2000, saving roughly 7 million lives in the process.

The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is a network of public-private partnerships to combat these three diseases around the world. Deaths from these illnesses have decreased by roughly one-third in countries where the Global Fund invests. In countries that received Global Fund grants, the malaria mortality rate for children under five has also decreased by roughly one-third.

To learn more about Red Nose Day and other ways organizations are working to end child poverty around the world, click here.