Bill Clinton's daughter, Chelsea in Nigeria for child health initiative

The 32-year-old daughter of President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton joined Nigerian officials, the prime minister of Norway and other leaders on Tuesday in promoting expanded access to zinc and oral rehydration solutions or ORS, a treatment that could prevent more than 90 percent of diarrhoea-related deaths in the country.

“It is unconscionable that in the 21st century, children still die of diarrhoea,” Clinton told Reuters in an exclusive interview by phone from Abuja, Nigeria. The goal of the initiative in Nigeria is to help drive down the cost of high-quality ORS and zinc treatments and increase awareness for them, said Clinton, currently a doctoral candidate in international relations at the University of Oxford.

Currently, fewer than 2 percent of children in Nigeria have access to the World Health Organization-recommended treatment. Increasing the number of children with access to the therapy to 80 percent by 2015 would help prevent an estimated 220,000 deaths in Nigeria. “I would like to see us make real, measurable progress here in Nigeria and in the other countries where we are working on ORS zinc,” said Clinton, including Uganda and parts of India, as part of the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s new push to improve access to essential medicines for children.

“For me, it’s not complicated. We know what works and we should be doing more of it. And when we don’t know what works, we should be innovating and spending time and energy on designing these solutions to solve problems that haven’t been solved yet,” said Clinton.

“That is what I love about the work CHAI does and the work of the foundation more broadly,” she said.