“A NICKEL may not seem like a lot of money … but it could be enough to save the life of a child!”
– U.S. Fund for UNICEF fundraising letter

A nickel? Gimme a break!

First, you're not going to save the life of a child anywhere for a nickel. Secondly, for every nickel you donate to UNICEF, you'll be lucky if more than a couple of pennies actually go toward something that might help save a child's life.

Of the approximately 6.6 billion people in the world, an estimated 27 percent of them are children under the age of 15. That’s nearly 1.8 billion children globally. Zimbabwe has the world’s highest mortality rate for children: One child in eight will die before the age of five. Let us assume a worst-case scenario – that every nation were as bad and that every age group were as bad. That would mean three out of every eight children now living in the world would die by age 15 – about 700 million in all. Obviously, the global child mortality rate is nowhere near that. In fact, UNICEF estimates that about 11 million children die each year from preventable causes. But just for the sake of discussion, let’s assume the worst.

Now let us suppose a nickel really were sufficient to save a child’s life. That would mean you could save 700 million lives for a paltry $35 million. So why are children still dying?

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The annual budget for UNICEF, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, is in the range of $3 billion a year, up from around $2 billion in 2004, which if you took the claim of U.S. Fund for UNICEF at its word would be enough to save the lives of 60 billion children annually, 440 times the number of children born in the world each year and almost 10 times the world's total population.

O.K., granted there are a lot of things that could be done for very little money that would save lives. Let’s look at “just a few of the simple, low-cost methods that can change the lives of children around the world,” as described in the U.S. Fund for UNICEF fundraising letter – which they mass mail at a total cost (printing, postage, mailing lists, salaries, etc.) of probably close to a dollar a pop, or about 20 children’s lives. By their estimation, for every 10,000 they mail, they could have saved the lives of perhaps 200,000 children with the money they spent. To each letter, they attach a real, negotiable, hard-currency U.S. five-cent coin – just to lay a guilt trip on you and make you think, you greedy, heartless thing, that you are holding a child’s life in your hands.

Let’s look at some of their claims. Diarrheal dehydration caused by contaminated drinking water, causes about one-sixth of all childhood deaths, according to the letter. A packet of Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) cost only six cents, and when “dissolved in clean water, it can replace liquids and necessary minerals lost to diarrhea – and can bring an infant back from the brink of death.” Sounds wonderful, huh. For just six cents. But my sixth sense (the one called common sense) tells me there’s something wrong with this picture. Actually several things.

First of all, while you might consider a nickel not even worth bending over to pick up off the sidewalk, six cents is actually an exorbitant price to pay for a tiny packet containing nothing but salt and sugar, particularly for an organization with the purchasing power of UNICEF.

But if one packet of ORS really could save a child’s life, who’s going to quibble if it’s overpriced at six cents? UNICEF claims to save the lives of about two million children every year with ORS, presumably at a cost of just $120,000. But remember, diarrheal dehydration still causes one in six childhood deaths – or about another two million. If those two million lives could be saved for a nickel and a penny each, why are these children still dying! Why isn’t UNICEF spending another $120,000 out of its $3 billion, or a paltry four one-thousandths of one percent of its annual budget, to save those two million lives? It’s not for lack of money, thank you.

The fact is that a single packet of ORS is not going to save a child’s life, nor is a packet a day at a presumed cost of $18.25 per year per child. The fundraising letter declares, “Your gift today of $25 could provide over 400 packets of Oral Rehydration Salts to families in areas with unsafe water supplies.” But in reality, no amount of ORS will do a bit of good in areas with unsafe water supplies, because the problem is the unsafe water, and the salts won’t make the water safe. It’s just not that simple.

Then there are measles vaccinations. According to the fundraising letter, “some 30 to 40 million cases of measles still occur each year, killing an estimated 750,000 children under age five. Each of these deaths could have been prevented by a simple, safe, and highly effective vaccine that costs only $1.00 per child.” That makes it sound like each dollar you donate will save a life. But actually, on average 200 children must be vaccinated to save one child’s life. It's certainly worth doing. But if each of the 150 million children under the age of five not yet vaccinated could be vaccinated for a dollar – if just five percent of UNICEF’s annual budget could wipe out the disease – why are there still 750,000 children dying of measles each year? Again, it’s not for lack of money.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not criticizing efforts to save children’s lives by such programs as rehydration therapy or measles vaccinations, nor the UNICEF nutrition programs intended to prevent deaths from malnutrition. On the contrary, I fault UNICEF for not focusing more of its resources on such programs.

I abhor the lay-the-guilt-on-thick posturing of the UNICEF fund raisers as they try to make me feel that every nickel I don’t donate could have saved the life of a child. Not only is it not true, it is blatant hypocrisy.

At its inception, and for many years afterward, UNICEF was a great organization performing a laudable service. Unfortunately, UNICEF, like every other United Nations agency and the U.N. itself, has now shifted its main emphasis away from its charter mission and is focusing instead on a radical-leftist, anti-American agenda. More pennies from your one-nickel (or $100 or $10,000) donation go into programs calculated to undermine traditional values and morals than go into such programs as child nutrition and rehydration and vaccination that actually benefit children.

A large part of UNICEF's efforts today, carried out under the guise of fighting the AIDS epidemic, actually encourage promiscuity among young girls, on the premise that teenage abstinence from sex, whether in Sweden or the Congo, is an outmoded notion. The consequence of such an approach is more and more teen pregnancies and more and more children either being aborted or being being born with the HIV virus, and UNICEF is using your donated nickels (and American tax dollars) to make it happen.

A huge chunk of every dollar you donate to UNICEF goes not to save lives but to end life, through what the agency refers to as the “management of unwanted pregnancies.” UNICEF even lobbies in various nations – Australia, for example – against laws requiring parental notification before a minor child undergoes an abortion.

Another large chunk of your nickel-for-the-children is devoted to preferential treatment for girls and indoctrination to further the radical feminist agenda. As just one example, as reported by Douglas Sylva on National Review Online, in sub-Saharan Africa, where 27 percent of boys and just 22 percent of girls attend school, the focus is on bringing enrollment for girls up to the level of boys, not on improving overall enrollment. Yet in countries where more girls than boys are enrolled in school, there are no such programs to achieve gender equality. As Mr. Sylva states, every dollar spent on these types political-agenda-driven programs is a dollar that could have been spent on basic food and medicine.

One more thing. The fundraising letter claims: “Our work is supported entirely by voluntary contributions.” That is bogus. The largest single source of funding for UNICEF is the United States Treasury – your involuntary tax dollars – to the tune of $250 million a year. That’s on top of some $200 million in voluntary private donations from compassionate and selfless U.S. citizens and corporations.

All of that said, UNICEF does a lot of good, perhaps more good than any other agency in the U.N. system. It does save, and improve, the lives of many hundreds of thousands of children through some of its better programs, and those programs deserve to be supported. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of your donation goes into those worthwhile programs. The ideal solution, were it possible, would be not to defund UNICEF but to bring pressure to bear on the agency to clean out the corruption, to make its financial dealings transparent, and to focus its efforts on its original mission, not its present-day radically leftist agenda.

Giving credit where it is due, the current executive director, Ann Veneman – an enormous improvement over her predecessor, the radical feminist Carol Bellamy – is doing her darndest to reform the organization. But it's not an easy job and she's not getting a lot of support from the American left. Regrettably, as with the U.N. as a whole – which is now dominated by anti-American socialist and fascist dictatorships – unless America gets tough, the chances of meaningful reform seem bleak at best.