Child Health
Our child health programs focus on providing vital medical care, nutrition, and education to children, ensuring healthier futures and empowering families in communities we serve.
Our Impact
PIH ensures that child health goes beyond medicine by addressing essential needs like nutrition and clean water, combating preventable diseases, and providing holistic support for a child’s well-being.
- 70,000+KG of food produced
More than 70,000 kgs of nutrient-rich peanut paste produced each year to treat malnourished children in Haiti.
- 18,350children nourished
More than 18,350 children treated for malnutrition each year at PIH-supported facilities.
- 400,000+vaccines administered
More than 400,000 childhood vaccines administered at PIH-supported facilities.
Child Health
Every year, Partners In Health provides health care and social support for thousands of children, delivering compassionate care to society’s most vulnerable.
Most of the causes of child mortality—including pneumonia, malaria, and malnutrition—have seemingly simple remedies, such as vaccines, bed nets, and clean drinking water. But poverty and systemic injustice prevent children from receiving the care they need.
Partners In Health is on a mission to change that. We provide health care and social support for children in communities we serve while strengthening health systems to ensure that future generations receive the care they need. No child should die because they lack access to care.
Why focus on child health?
Each year, nearly 4.9 million children die before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of these deaths are caused by conditions that are preventable or treatable, including pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, measles, and malnutrition.
About 600 children are infected with HIV each day, the vast majority of whom reside in poor countries. Most of these infants could be protected from infection through effective testing and treatment—as they are in wealthy countries, where mother-to-child transmission of HIV has been nearly eliminated.
Child malnutrition also has a devastating impact on children in poor countries world-wide, contributing to premature death, stunting and damage to physical and cognitive development.
Our Response
PIH strives to eliminate this unnecessary suffering and death by ensuring all children have access to health care, food and education — all foundations for a healthy, productive life.
In many countries where we work, PIH supports school-age children and their families by covering educational fees such as tuition and supplies. Beyond education, our accompaniment can also include food packages, new home construction and emergency repairs, and reimbursement for transportation to hospitals and health clinics. Social support provides critical resources to families as they break the cycle of poverty and ensure a better future for their children.
In Haiti, we support the construction and operations of pediatric facilities at hospitals in Mirebalais and St-Marc, enhancing staffing, equipment and quality of care for children and infants. Through the use of mobile malnutrition clinics that reach into the most remote communities, we are providing malnourished children with care and access to Nourimanba, a locally produced peanut-based, high-calorie food.
Community health workers serve as a bridge between the mobile clinics and health centres and hospitals, ensuring proper patient follow-up and links to more specialized care for the most severe cases.
Nourimamba: Food as medicine
In Haiti, one in five children is malnourished and faces physical and cognitive stunting. To tackle this problem, staff with Zanmi Lasante, as Partners In Health is known in Haiti, distribute a fortified, peanut-based food supplement called Nourimanba to families of children diagnosed with malnutrition.
