High profile donors and politicians are gathering in London on Monday to pledge $3.7-billion towards immunisation programmes in a bid to protect millions of children.
Entitled, Saving children’s lives, the pledging conference is being run by Gavi Alliance, a high-level global partnership between private and public sectors, and developing and donor nations.
Gavi partners, donors, co-financing countries and vaccine manufacturers are set to address the need to scale-up immunisation programmes between 2011 and 2015, to immunise an additional 243-million children.
Watch the press conference featuring Bill Gates, United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron, the UK Secretary of state Andrew Mitchell and senior ministers from Norway, Sweden, United States, Canada, the European Union, and Rwanda.
Date: June 13 2011
Time: 2.30pm to 3pm South African time
The conference builds on Gavi’s success in preventing more than five million deaths in its first decade, and looks to save a further four million lives by 2015, the organisation said.
Despite significant progress made in reducing childhood mortality, nearly two million children die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases. Most of these deaths occur in low-income countries. Pneumonia and diarrhoea are the two leading killers, causing nearly 40% of all childhood deaths.
Go here for more information.