Carolyn Miles: Innovative solutions for improving the lives of children
More often than not there is a solution, but the fundamental problem lies in how that solution is delivered.
If Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children USA, had the absolute authority to design lifesaving development programming from the ground up, she wouldn’t focus on health, education, or protection: She would focus on all three, all at once. “A child is not a ‘health child,’ or an ‘education child,’ or a ‘protection child.’ Obviously — it’s one child,” she told Displaced hosts Grant and Ravi. Integrated programming — targeting indicators like maternal well-being, the age of marriage, equal access to quality education, child labor, and global health supply chains, all at the same time — is the key to reaching children like the 5.6 million children who died of preventable causes in 2017, Miles said.
Save the Children USA is the largest branch of Save the Children International, a $2-billion organization delivering services to 56 million children in 120 countries. Miles has risen to the top of the outfit, but her path there was far from conventional. Before joining Save USA in 1998, Miles studied animal behavior at Bucknell College, marketed credit cards to a rising Asian middle class, and founded a coffee company in Hong Kong. Since then, she’s overseen the nonprofit’s controversial child sponsorship campaign, managed relief efforts in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and spearheaded a drive for greater collaboration among humanitarian organizations that culminated in the Global Emergency Response Coalition, a shared platform for aid groups to raise funding for under-served causes
Intuitively, the logic of a suite of holistic interventions makes sense. But what many people outside the humanitarian and development sector don’t know is that in general, nonprofit CEOs like Carolyn rarely have the ability to design the programming they implement from the ground up. Large donors, including governments and philanthropic foundations, that fund the vast majority of humanitarian and development activities, usually dictate where and how their money is to be spent. Of Save International’s $1.2 billion in revenue in 2016, only 1% came without restrictions on how or where it was to be spent. That aligns with trends across the sector — of the UN’s humanitarian funding, for example, only 1% is unrestricted.
“The fundamental insight that resonates with me is that for a lot of solutions, particularly health, we know what the actual solution is. We know how to solve pneumonia. We know how to reduce child mortality,” Carolyn told Grant and Ravi. “The fundamental problem is designing the way that we deliver the interventions, the way that we increase uptake and compliance and change behavior norms, to actually make them work.”
Education … is not a luxury for children. It is … the most important thing in helping kids get back to this sense of, ‘something is normal about life.’
On this episode of Displaced, we spoke with Carolyn about why she’s working with mothers-in-law around the world to have a positive impact on their grandchildren’s health, how the way we define what a child is changes how we think about child labor, and why partnering with the private sector needs to go beyond assisting people negatively affected by that industry to develop interventions that use people’s competitive and profit-seeking motives for good.
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Read some of the sources that informed this episode of Displaced
The Role of Multi-Sector Partnerships in the New Development Era. CSIS Panel. May 1, 2017.
The Humanitarian R&D Imperative: How other sectors overcame impediments to innovation. Deloitte. March 2015.
Eichenauer, Vera Z. and Bernhard Reinsberg. What determines earmarked funding to international development organizations? Evidence from the new multi-bi aid data. The Review of International Organizations 12:2 (2017). Open-source.
Haines, Andy, et al. Achieving child survival goals: potential contribution of community health workers. The Lancet 369:9579 (2007).
Lux, Steven J. and Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken. From Alliance to international: The Global Alliance of Save the Children. Syracuse University E-PARCC Collaborative Governance Initiative. 2013.
End of Childhood Report 2017. Save the Children. 2017.
Donor Conditions and Their Implications for Humanitarian Response. Inter-Agency Standing Committee Humanitarian Financing Task Team. The United Nations. April 2016.
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