Deputy Health Minister Dr Gwen Ramokgopa has challenged health workers to put more focus on achieving better outcomes on child services.

An estimated 18 million children worldwide have been forcibly displaced from their homes because of conflict; a third of those are refugees whose families have fled across international borders, research shows.

Authorities in Kano, Nigeria, recently announced people would be jailed or fined for refusing to immunize their children against polio, as cases increase in the northern state, but it is unclear whether this approach is working.

"It is imperative that NCDs prevention programmes target youth since lifestyle habits are often adopted at this stage of life and frequently remain well into adulthood," Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General Ransford Smith.

Bribes, poorly trained medical staff and the lack of medical care for pregnant HIV-positive mothers are among the reasons for high rates of infant and maternal mortality in Uganda. NGOs want to see more government action.

Tanzanian development activists have voiced concern over the country's ailing education and health sectors as government fails to take deliberate measures to revamp them through allocation of more funds in the national budget.

This is a children’s famine.  The magnitude of suffering and loss is tremendous.  The haunting images we have seen from the Horn of Africa and the facts of this emergency speak for themselves.

UNICEF has called for an immediate expansion of assistance across the Horn of Africa’s drought affected communities, to address the dire needs of more than two million children, of whom half a million are at imminent risk of dying. With no improvement in the overall food security conditions expected before early 2012 the already severe nutrition situation will likely worsen further.

No one can tell 64-year-old Fatoumata Kané anything new about the plants and tree bark around her town of Banamba in western Mali, but the traditional healer recently learned how to measure a child’s upper arm to detect malnutrition.

Through no fault of her own, baby Zarau Audu may not be able to walk normally when she grows up. Unlike most of her peers, at 11 months old, she already faces the daunting prospect of being physically challenged throughout life. If she were able to speak, certainly she would not have kind words for her mother, who by her actions or rather, lack of action, has placed her in this precarious position.