OUR IMPACT IN 2023

Overall progress towards our Healthy Start in Life goal is strong. We have seen gains in our work to ensure institutions are accountable for children’s rights and we have seen significant financial commitments to our global health work.

• In 2023, we trained 45,000 community health workers and health care providers. This represents 129% of the target we aimed to reach by 2024.

In humanitarian contexts:
• We ensured children and their families living in or fleeing crises could continue to access life-saving health and nutrition services, by helping to treat and prevent injuries, illnesses, diseases, and malnutrition.

• We supported the continuation of essential services, such as maternal and newborn care, childhood vaccination campaigns, and sexual and reproductive healthcare, including specialist services for gender-based violence survivors.

• We made sure children could access drinking water, toilets and washing facilities to help protect them from deadly illnesses and diseases, and to preserve their dignity.

• We accelerated our impact by shifting power to local actors wherever possible, by supporting and scaling up community-based approaches and investing in services led by local and national health authorities.

Progress towards our Safe Back to School influencing work is on track to meet our 2024 target. The performance of this work to ensure institutions are accountable for children’s rights is encouraging.

2023 successes included:

• We made significant achievements in influencing national governments to support early childhood care and development, especially in Ethiopia, Kosovo, and South Africa.

• In Cote D’Ivoire, we influenced a policy change to provide pre-primary education in primary schools, starting with rural areas.

• We far exceeded our target regarding the number of teachers we trained or supported, training 87,500 teachers and facilitators to provide quality teaching for children.

• Our ‘Catch-up Clubs’ continued to grow and provide children with opportunities for the learning they missed out on due to challenges such as COVID-19. By the end of 2023, among the 58,244 children across 13 countries who attended the Catch-up Clubs, 48% of children reached the highest literacy levels, being able to read and demonstrate comprehension of an age-appropriate story.

• We supported more than 2.7 million children to participate in learning opportunities in humanitarian contexts in 2023. This included 960,000 children in Ethiopia and 561,000 children in Yemen.

• Working with local partners, community stakeholders, governments, and caregivers, we supported or set up temporary or informal learning spaces, replenished lost or damaged learning materials, and provided teachers with training, including on child protection and psychosocial support.

Our performance last year against our targets for our Live Free from Violence goal was the strongest of all our goals.

• Our influencing contributed to 25 governments and institutions being made more accountable. This work is underpinned by our contribution to 57 policy, legislative and budget changes relating to protection.

• We contributed to making sure that four countries saw state and non-state actors held to account for grave violations and other serious violations of child rights in conflict and crisis.

• Last year, our work to de-stigmatise and raise awareness of the benefits of mental health and psychosocial support in crisis regions was effective. In Afghanistan, for example, we saw a positive shift in children’s perceptions of mental health and psychosocial support.

• In 2023, we supported 9,400 child protection service providers with improved capacity to prevent and respond to cases of violence against children.

• Our recommendations significantly shaped the International Criminal Court’s revised Policy on Children. We advocated for a child-rights and child-sensitive approach in international justice processes.

• Our influencing work, with our partners, saw the African Union and 15 institutions commit to enhancing financial and political investment in justice access for children affected by armed conflict.

• Our advocacy work, with our partners, contributed to the UN General Assembly's resolution to include protection of children in digital spaces.

We made significant progress against our objectives in our Safety Nets and Resilient Families advocacy work, contributing to policy changes related to the climate crisis and social protection, and a high number of policy wins in country.

For example:
• We successfully influenced the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s release of General Comment No. 26 on children’s rights and climate change, and an agreement at COP28.

• In 2023, we worked with more than 25 organisations through the Global Alliance Cities4Children to raise awareness of the millions of children growing up in slums, so they are considered during the creation of development agendas, and funding and agency priorities.

• Our Green Mindsets work equips adolescents with the environmental knowledge and skills to become more mindful of their present and future impact on the environment and become motivated to create a sustainable world. We expanded this work to another 11 countries across Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean in 2023.

• Our Anticipatory Action work, acting ahead of a predicted
hazard or weather event, helped communities prepare for El Niño impacts in 14 countries.

• We provided 8.2 million people with livelihoods support, including supporting 1.2 million children and adults with cash and voucher assistance. This represents 80% of the target we hope to reach annually with cash and voucher assistance by 2024.

• We conducted wide-ranging research about the impact of our combined cash and voucher assistance plus child protection programmes, looking at a diverse range of humanitarian contexts, including children associated with armed forces and armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, child labour in Egypt, child marriage in the Philippines, and family wellbeing and child labour in Lithuania.

The research found that cash plus protection produces better outcomes for children compared to cash alone, including significant reduction in child labour rates, reductions in child stress, improvements in household wellbeing, and increases in perceptions of child safety.

Save the Children has been fighting for children’s rights for over 100 years. Our founder drafted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, the first international declaration promoting child rights, adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. Many years later, this evolved into the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

Our work continues every day to try to realise our founding ambition for every child, everywhere, to secure their rights. At the centre of this work is our support to building systems that are resilient and accountable to children. We do this through driving:

• Social accountability – Supporting children to organise with their communities to hold decision-makers accountable for their public service commitments to children.

• Public investment in children – Advocating for and
supporting governments to raise and spend more money, more fairly, and more transparently to fulfil children’s rights.

• Child rights reporting – Supporting diverse children to organise with civil society to monitor and report on child rights in their countries, and to secure a recognised space for child activists and human rights defenders.

EQUALITY AND NON-DISCRIMINATION

Children have the right to survive, learn, be protected, develop, and participate, free from discrimination and inequality. Yet they often face discrimination because of their age, and many children face additional discrimination based on other aspects of their identity, such as gender, disability, socio-economic status, race, religious practice, or sexual orientation.

We focus on upholding child rights and achieving equality by
tackling the systems that are the root causes of inequality and
discrimination. In 2023:

• Our national office in Kosovo supported the professional
development and employment of people with disabilities. This included vocational training courses for men and women with disabilities, upskilling teachers and schools on inclusive education, and raising awareness with the general public.

• We engaged communities, including leaders and influential
individuals, in four regions of Ethiopia on the issues of female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage. We supported women and girls to increase their awareness of the issue, integrated the issue of FGM into bylaws, and improved the referral system for victims. After our intervention, we found that the prevalence of FGM declined by 24% across the four regions.

• We increased our evidence-based programming to reduce
child marriages and unions thanks to a global funding ‘accelerator’. We conducted ‘gender and power’ analyses in more than 14 countries looking at how gender intersects with other power differentials, such as disability; sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC); race; and ethnicity, to help us work to prevent these harmful practices.

Climate change now threatens to destroy much of the progress we’ve made. Climate change is hurting those least responsible for it most: children. And those already facing hunger and conflict, poverty, and discrimination are suffering most of all. But there’s still time to change course.

Those living in places impacted most by climate change – including children – know best what needs to be done. And as the leading experts on children’s rights, we are working to increase the climate resilience of children, their communities, and their futures with smart solutions.

We can already see our solutions changing children’s lives, and we’ll keep on innovating to discover more, hand in hand with children, their communities, our trusted partners, and global supporters.

Our response to the climate crisis is a focus for our global advocacy and campaigning, programming and partnerships, fundraising, also with partners, and our own operations.

Read about our approaches to tackling the climate crisis in our full Annual Report.

At Save the Children, we know that great teams are made up of people who come from a wide range of backgrounds.

We believe that, if we want to better reflect and represent the children and communities we serve, then we must continue to diversify the make-up of our organisation, including our leadership teams, and create an inclusive work environment where staff can be themselves.

We continued our work last year to develop and increase diversity of our talent, leadership, and management pools, and on optimising our learning systems. We focused on succession planning for mission critical roles and senior leadership roles, such as Country Directors and our Extended Leadership Team.

We are committed to creating a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisation. Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy outlines our commitment to fairness in our recruitment, training, promotion, and employment processes for all staff. It also prohibits any form of discrimination against staff from protected characteristics, including sex/gender, disability, race, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression reassignment, religion or belief, marital or civil partner status, and pregnancy and maternity.

In 2023, we launched a gender pay gap analysis study in conjunction with our Gender Pay Gap Advisory Group to examine the root causes of our gender pay gap. This work is being led by an external consultant who will develop actionable, evidence-based recommendations to inform the basis of an action plan in 2024 on how we can narrow the gap.

2024 is the third and final year of our three-year strategy that sees us accelerating our progress towards the breakthroughs we want to see by 2030.

We know our strategic direction remains relevant but our approach must evolve, so we are in the process of reconfirming our current global strategy and country strategies for another three years, while updating them where necessary.

Our collective priorities for 2024 will see us step up our progress in key areas of the strategy.

• We will strengthen our focus on children most impacted by inequality and discrimination.

• We will assert our position that the climate crisis is a child rights crisis and strengthen child participation in support of children’s rights, and in promoting accountability to children.

• We will embed digital and data to measure impact, drive evidence-based decision-making, and support fundraising.

• We will continue to strengthen strategic partnerships to amplify impact.

• We will also strengthen our focus on people and talent to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion across the organisation, developing our leaders so that they have the skills and confidence to further our agenda and build an inclusive and compassionate culture.

• We also intend to grow unrestricted income through long-term investment and by creating a best-in-class experience for our supporters.

• We will also champion a change programme to make Save the Children fit for future, with a focus on reforms to shore up our financial sustainability and become a stronger, locally led, globally connected movement.