Abstract

PIP: Growth monitoring charts, packets of oral rehydration salts (ORS), and vaccines, are inexpensive, life-saving, growth-protecting technologies which can enable parents to protect their children against the worst effects of poverty. Similarly, a matrix of current and easily understandable information about pregnancy, breast feeding, weaning, feeding during and immediately after illness, child spacing, and preparing and using home-made oral rehydration solutions, also could empower parents to protect the lives and the health of their children. The question arises as to how can these technologies and this information be put at the disposal of millions of families in the low-income world. The initial task of the Child Survival and Development Revolution is the communication of what is now possible, yet little is known about how to communicate information whose principal value is to the poor. There are 2 large-scale precedents: the Green Revolution, which in many instances succeeded in putting into the hands of thousands of small and large farmers the techniques and the knowledge which enabled them to double and treble the yields from their lands; and the campaign to put the knowledge and the means of family planning at the disposal of many millions of people. There are 2 lessons to be learned from these precedents: they have shown that the way to promote a people's technology and to put information at the disposal of the majority is by mobilizing all possible resources and working through all possible channels both to create the demand and to meet it; and neither the Green Revolution nor the family planning movement rally took off until they were viewed as political and economic priorities and given the full support of the nation's political leadership. Nowhere are these 2 lessons more clearly illustrated than in present-day Indonesia. Because the campaign for family planning was given high personal and political priority by the President, and because 85% of all family planning services were made available outside formal health services, almost all Indonesian parents currently have access to the knowledge and means of contraception. A similar combination of presidential leadership and the use of all available channels was responsible for Indonesia's successful Green Revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s. There is no convincing medical reason why ORS should only be available through clinics or health centers. If the salts are to become available to the majority, then the time has came for mass information campaigns to create the demand, and for the product itself to be available.