Core Contribution for the Alliance Enfants du Monde-SolidarMed 2025-2028

The international environment is characterised by numerous multiple crises. The consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the escalation in the Middle East, food insecurity, debt burden and inflation, climate change and the energy crisis are all having a direct impact on the world's population. They particularly affect the most vulnerable, mostly women and children and result in increasing humanitarian needs.

Accelerated change is accompanied by increased uncertainty: The world is becoming more fragmented, unstable and unpredictable. Whilst the vision to reach the Sustainable Development Goals remains, challenges including the accelerating global food and nutrition crisis, shrinking civic and humanitarian space, the erosion of rule of law, intensifying armed conflicts, more frequent climate-related disasters, international migration and internal displacement, exacerbated demographics and an important gender gap hamper progress in reaching them and pose a main challenge for all actors engaged in Switzerland’s International Cooperation. 

Most of its 16 intervention countries of the EdM-SoMe Alliance in Sub-Sahara Africa, South-East Asia are confronted with degrading health conditions: disability and death due to avoidable maternal, new-born, child, reproductive and infectious causes and with new challenges such as chronic life-threatening diseases, emerging epidemics, or anti-microbial resistance. 

Basic education remains inaccessible for more than 70 million children. Often, the quality of education is low; children leave school without having acquired most basic competencies. Girls are disproportionally affected and have significantly poorer prospects of completing their education.

In the domain of health, over 271’500 women and new-borns were assisted by qualified clinicians during childbirth and right after. Nearly 3’797’500 children, women and men saw their health status improved through acute or chronic care consultations for conditions such as malaria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, measles, or HIV. The Alliance contributed to improve health services provided in 505 facilities and built the capacities of over 8’500 health providers. 19 innovations, such as the mobile application “clinical decision support for frontline health workers” are integrated in national health systems.

In the domain of education, over 170’500 children, including 82’500 girls, were able to access quality basic education in 990 educational structures. Nearly 7'000 education personnel have been trained, including more than 3’500 women. 

The pedagogical environment in schools has been enriched with 120 teaching materials, contributing to an improvement in the quality of teaching/learning processes. The extent to which the pedagogical improvements promoted by EdM are institutionalised by the national education system has also evolved positively, from incomplete to moderate.

The Alliance has long-lasting partnerships with civil society partners in the Global South, adopting a proactive subsidiarity approach and systematically strengthening partner organisations. It also embraces National ownership through five pillars of action: initial dialogue with public authorities to define area and scope of intervention, alignment of programmes in national policies, use of public monitoring systems, mutual accountability and scaling up of relevant pilot experiences when possible.

PSEAH (and other integrity, including child safeguarding) policies are important foundations to adhere to the highest compliance and moral standards. A key achievement has been the participatory development, adoption and implementation of policy documents and standard processes for awareness-raising, communication and reporting on PSEAH.

• Improved National Health Systems provide health care of better quality and coverage.
• Vulnerable populations have improved capacities to stay healthy, interact with health services and their access to care is improved.
• The quality of education is improved, with a focus on basic education.
• Pedagogical improvements are integrated by the education system at national, regional or local level.
• Dialogue and engagement with citizens, stakeholders, and policy makers is facilitated to strengthen health and education systems and raise awareness on Alliance priority themes.

The role of Swiss NGOs in the implementation of the Swiss IC Strategy 2025-28 shall be strengthened through:

a) sharpening the narrative on the importance of the core contribution,

b) an inclusive policy dialogue,

c) Locally led development and

d) potential adaptations of programmes and approaches (reforms in the larger sense).