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Can $7 Save a Child’s Life? | ChildLife Foundation, 2026 #SkollAwardee

Skoll Foundation
Skoll Foundation•Apr 7, 2026

Why It Matters

By halving under‑five deaths, ChildLife’s scalable model offers a cost‑effective blueprint for improving child health outcomes globally.

Key Takeaways

  • •One thousand children under five die daily in Pakistan.
  • •Improving emergency departments could cut child mortality by fifty percent.
  • •Model adds infrastructure, staff, accountability, and remote‑medicine technology.
  • •Remote network now operates in over 300 hospitals nationwide.
  • •Goal: free, world‑class pediatric care within thirty minutes.

Summary

The video spotlights ChildLife Foundation, a 2026 Skoll Award recipient, detailing its mission to dramatically lower Pakistan’s under‑five mortality rate through a comprehensive health‑system overhaul anchored by tele‑medicine.

Pakistan sees roughly 1,000 children under five die each day; the foundation argues that upgrading emergency departments alone could slash deaths by 50%. Their strategy blends infrastructure upgrades, recruitment of medical personnel, and the creation of accountable performance feedback loops.

Dr. Remsha emphasizes a vision where no child is more than a half‑hour from world‑class, free, 24/7 care. Leveraging a remote‑medicine platform, ChildLife now supports over 300 hospitals, reaching an estimated 85% of the nation’s pediatric population.

If scaled, this model could set a new benchmark for low‑cost, high‑impact health delivery, prompting policymakers and donors to prioritize system‑wide reforms that replicate the remote‑care framework across other low‑resource settings.

Original Description

Today, 1,000 children will die in Pakistan—largely from treatable diseases like pneumonia. With better emergency care, at least half of those children could be saved.
ChildLife Foundation’s mission is to ensure no child in Pakistan is more than 30 minutes away from lifesaving care. The organization transforms the way emergency rooms treat kids by bringing new technologies, training, and processes into government-run facilities, and connecting them to pediatric specialists via telemedicine. The result is faster diagnosis, earlier treatment, and dramatically lower mortality—delivered free of charge to families.
This film explores the profound impact of stronger emergency care: the gift of life for millions of children.
Visit the ChildLife Foundation profile page on Skoll.org: https://skoll.wf/childlife
About Dr. Ahson Rabbani, CEO
Ahson Rabbani is the CEO of ChildLife Foundation, one of Pakistan’s largest pediatric emergency care networks, serving over two million children annually across 14 ERs and 300+ telemedicine-linked hospitals.
With 25 years of development-sector leadership and a decade in global corporations, Rabbani is known for building high-performance, values-driven teams and advancing gender-inclusive health care. Combining engineering and management training, Rabbani has made ChildLife a leading model of scalable public-private partnership in health care settings within low- and middle-income countries.
VIDEO CREDITS:
Directors - Uzair Surhio, Matthew Beighley, Gabriel Diamond
Editor - Matthew Beighley
Producer - Gabriel Diamond
Cinematography - Khuram Rasheed, Gabriel Diamond
Story Advisors - Nikhil Ramnarayan, Kathryn Harrison
Executive Producer - Phil Collis
Editorial - Alissa Gulin
Translator - Uzair Surhio, Huma H.
Poster Design - Emily Lam
About the Skoll Awards For Social Innovation
The Skoll Foundation presents the Skoll Awards for Social Innovation each year to a select group of social innovators whose work targets the root causes of societal problems that are ripe for transformational social change.
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