A project underway aiming to care for one million children in three years

The Pope’s Global Alliance for Children’s Health

The protagonists of the initiative, led by Fr. Enzo Fortunato and Aldo Cagnoli
and coordinated by Mariella Enoc, in audience with the Holy Father

VATICAN CITY, 20 SEPTEMBER – Caring for one million children over the next three years. This is the aim of the Pope’s Global Alliance for Children’s Health, the new global network for providing health and humanitarian care to the youngest. A network that brings hospital structures around the world together to collaborate, launched by the American non-profit organization “Patrons of the World’s Children Hospital, to whom Pope Francis entrusted this mission last 11 May, based on a proposal from Mariella Enoc.

“Children are the seed of our future. With children we can build a new world”: with these words, the promoters and partners of the initiative were received in audience by the Holy Father.

The alliance has two main objectives. On the one hand, to create a global network for childhood, a fully-fledged humanitarian community coordinated by the Organizing Committee of World Children’s Day, coordinated by Fr. Fortunato and Aldo Cagnoli. On the other, to build a network dedicated to the care of minors throughout the world and to provide specialized support to healthcare personnel on the ground because, as the Holy Father has emphasized, “there are incurable diseases but there are no incurable children”.

For this, a Hub and Spoke mechanism has been developed. The Hubs are hospitals of excellence that join the initiative all over the world, and provide science and care to the Spokes, i.e. health facilities and health points scattered in areas of the planet where the demand for health is unmet. The point of contact between them is a “multilingual digital platform” created by Almaviva and Salesforce and connected to the telehealth system provided by Teladoc Health.

The Hubs - the first of which will be Bambino Gesù, “the Pope's hospital” - provide their know-how to take care of the children and to offer technical support to the doctors and nurses of the Spokes, who are called upon to identify the most urgent paediatric cases and to prepare an initial collection of the relevant medical and administrative documentation, to then submit it to the Hubs, whose task it is to provide the appropriate healthcare responses. The Spoke network is coordinated by Cuamm, Doctors for Africa, and Pime, the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions.

Father Fortunato and Aldo Cagnoli, in thanking the Holy Father during the meeting, emphasized that “today one of the challenges that the World Children's Day Committee is called upon to take up is that of putting the fragility of the smallest at the centre, to make it become the strength of a better world’.

“‘In the world there are many children in desperate need of medical care”, remarked Fabrizio Arengi Bentiviglio, president of the Patrons of the World’s Children Hospital. “I am thinkinga of children in the war in Ukraine and Gaza, and I am thinking also of other forms of human rights abuses and natural disasters. But where there is an emergency and there are global communication spots lighting up, we also find organizations that deal with it: governments, the United Nations, WHO, foundations”.

“Unfortunately”, Arengi Bentivoglio continues, “there are also hundreds of thousands of children who need daily help in areas that are talked about very little, for whom there are no protection mechanisms. These are the first children we want to help”.

Patrons of the World’s Children Hospital is the American corporation that promotes the Alliance and is engaged in nurturing the global children’s health network by raising awareness and funds. It also oversees the agreements between Hub and Spoke, the implementation of the project with new collaboration opportunities, and relations with partners who have already joined the initiative.

The audience with the Holy Father was attended by, besides various members of the board of the Patrons of the World’s Children Hospital, representatives of all the organizations involved: the Bambin Gesù Children’s Hospital, Almaviva, Teladoc Health, CUAMM, PIME, and Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington.