More than 10 million children die each year in the developing world. Although mortality rates for children under -five years of age dropped by 16 percent since 1990, the rates still remain high in developing countries. At current rates of progress, only a few countries are likely to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality to one-third of their 1990 statistics. One of the major reasons for the expected failure to achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is due to unavailability of sufficient resources and a lack of access to research and expertise in low- and middle- income countries. OCHRC decided to assist in bringing change to this situation by effectively mapping stakeholders and creating a forum where they are communicating on a regular basis, providing feedback, and serve as resource centre.
In 2002 under Request for Proposal (RFP-1), OCHRC funded three regional initiatives in Africa, Asia and Latin America to develop regional profiles by identification of regional child health and nutrition (CHN) research agendas and mapping of actors, i.e. individual researchers, organizations, universities, and groups, and their roles in the field of child health and nutrition within a region. The regional profiles includes brief descriptions of importance of child health and nutrition research in an historical context, description of the process through which regional research priorities were identified, identification of urgent child health and nutrition research gaps and map of regional research actors. The regional profile identifies key regional challenges for child health and nutrition research for the next decade in each region.
In 2005 OCHRC planned to develop OCHRC Online Community where a virtual community will share child health and nutrition research related information and the site will serve as a resource centre.
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