Recently, Save the Children spoke with the U.S. Congress to urge them not to cut lifesaving aid for children. We sent our best health experts, but, equally important, we provided a platform for members of the public to let decision-makers know how significant it is for them to support children in poverty.

Globally, eight million children die every year before the age of five. Experts concur that most of these deaths are preventable. But experts alone cannot prevent these deaths. Specialists need to work with the wider public in both developing and developed countries. Public engagement helps people know what they can do in their immediate and wider contexts to help save children’s lives, and helps ensure that child survival is accorded the priority and handled with the understanding required at every level of decision-making, from the global to the local.

Save the Children is running our own global, public campaign for Child Survival called EVERY ONE, involving a range of people: from world leaders to movie stars, rural mothers in Bangladesh to the upwardly mobile young of Delhi, Seoul, and Toronto.

Save the Children’s decades of experience in programming across the world includes helping to pioneer technical innovations in child health across the micro-macro range, from neonatal care improvements to support for health budgeting processes and removing financial barriers to health. These are necessary conditions for progress, but popular campaigning has a vital, complementary function.

Campaigns help generate the enabling context required for already-known technical solutions to be realized. The recent history of action on HIV/AIDS is a good illustration. Scientific learning has been essential to prevention and treatment efforts but engendering a transformational increase in popular understanding and commitment has enabled changes ranging from individual behaviour to international financial commitments, saving millions of lives and livelihoods. UNAIDS founding Director Peter Piot cites the keys to success in reducing new HIV infections and declining mortality rates as going “beyond today’s medical model and today’s public health” to include “leadership…and mobilization of the community as a whole in a true campaign.”

For child survival, public engagement has comparable potential.

Research shows that investment in children’s health can deliver important economic as well as social dividends. The World Bank estimates that 50 percent of Asia’s economic growth between 1965 and 1990 is attributable to demographic and health improvements. Ensuring the connection between social and economic gains is more widely understood can help enable decision-makers to allocate what is needed.

To dramatically reduce child mortality around the world, the insight of a relatively small number of experts is vital, but that alone will not be enough. The more people we involve in these discussions—around both the traditional village water pump and the high-tech office water cooler—the more progress we will make.

Save the Children’s global Child Survival Campaign, EVERY ONE, brings both of these together. Only doing both can secure a world without unnecessary infant deaths.