Could Social Technologies Save Children from Disease?

Rebecca Hanlin's essay, Social Technologies to Save Children from Disease, has been included in UNICEF's The State of the World's Children report. Launched on the 25th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Reimagine the Future: Innovation for Every Child, is a crowd-sourced compilation of some of the most cutting-edge innovations and an interactive platform that maps innovation across the globe. It calls on governments, development professionals, businesses and communities to tackle the most pressing problems facing children, working together to drive new ideas and find fresh ways to scale up the most promising local innovations.

As vaccine-preventable diseases, such as polio, measles and tetanus, continue to kill hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five every year, Rebecca explores vaccines and the collaborations necessary to create them. However, as she discusses in her essay, even when a vaccine is available it won't necessarily eradicate the disease. While childhood polio mass vaccination campaigns have eradicated the disease from much of the world, it remains endemic in Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan where vaccination campaigns have been hampered by cultural and political factors. And it is here that social technologies – the organisational and institutional arrangements that underpin successful vaccine design, development and implementation – have a vital role to play.

Read Social Technologies to Save Children from Disease.

Read the State of the Worlds Children report in full.