New York, NY
Remarks
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you so much Cathy [Russell], and thank you for your trailblazing leadership – as we’ll hear today, UNICEF is playing an absolutely vital role in spearheading this partnership.
We have an extraordinary group gathered here today. We have President [Luis] Abinader of the Dominican Republic, President [Lazarus] Chakwera of Malawi, Prime Minister [K.P. Sharma] Oli of Nepal, too many foreign ministers and leaders across philanthropy and business to name – a packed house, standing room only.
This is a big day. It's a historic day. There is an expression that President Biden once famously used about days like this. Do you remember? It's a really important day. I can't say that out loud.
But to put into perspective the magnitude of what we are about to accomplish today, I want to take a moment to bring us back, actually, to the 1700s. The brilliant inventor, publisher, and later Founding Father of the United States Benjamin Franklin was working in a print shop when a fellow workman warned him about the risks of working with the lead type that they used in the printing press. The workman said that when people heated the lead type, their hands would start shaking uncontrollably – eventually, they’d get so sick they could no longer work. Franklin avoided the practice – saving his steady hands, and perhaps his legendary brain, too.
But, he was absolutely mystified. He knew of many cases, he wrote to a friend, of people getting sick from lead: after drinking water that had fallen off roofs covered in leaded paint or drinking rum that came from casks with lead still inside. Yet, humans were still using it – continuing to poison our own communities. And, here is what he wrote at the time: “You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on.”
Benjamin Franklin did not even know just how right he would prove to be.
We are here today, 238 years after he wrote those words. And yes, we have indeed taken many steps to remove lead from our own communities here in the United States, for example. But in developing countries around the world, lead is still contaminating the paint that covers children’s toys and bedroom walls, the cookware their parents use to make them meals, and the spices that those parents use to flavor those meals. Industrial practices like unsafe recycling of lead acid batteries are still leaching lead into the air that children breathe and the soil that they play in outside.
Today, one in two children in low- and middle-income countries has elevated levels of lead in their blood. Let’s say that again: half of kids in developing countries today are being poisoned by lead. Lead that slows their brain development, harms their bodies, and can even kill them.
The Center for Global Development estimates that the damage lead is causing to children’s brains accounts for 20 percent of the education gap between high- and low-income countries.
All told, every year, lead poisoning is estimated to cost the global economy more than $1 trillion.
And every year, it claims at least 1.5 million lives – more than annual deaths from HIV and malaria combined.
Around the world, lead is quietly draining kids' potential – in ways that can be hard to detect unless you look. After the U.S. phased out leaded gasoline in the 1970s, for example, NASCAR's race cars got an exemption, allowing them to keep using it. It was only when scientists began tracking the impact on the surrounding communities that we found out that, in the areas closest to NASCAR’s race tracks, babies’ birth weights were lower and childrens’ test scores were worse. After NASCAR switched to lead-free gas in 2007, those differences went away.
We have failed, however, to undertake a concerted global effort to find out where kids are being poisoned and stop it from happening.
Historically, the yearly global funding for tackling lead poisoning in developing countries has totaled less than $15 million. That’s the cost of a single 60-second ad at the Super Bowl. It’s a tiny fraction of what is spent on diseases with similar health burdens.
It’s been centuries – and still, humanity has not gotten over that shocking inaction that Ben Franklin described.
But we are changing that today.
Later this afternoon, we will launch the Partnership for a Lead Free Future – a coalition of partners across governments, philanthropies, and businesses with a clear goal: end childhood lead poisoning in developing nations by 2040.
You are going to hear from changemakers who have identified incredibly effective, affordable ways to take on lead poisoning in their own communities – removing lead from entire categories of consumer goods in a country for as little as a few hundred thousand dollars in donor funding.
You will hear from Heads of State who are committing to implementing these solutions so they can protect their people. Already, in just the eight months since we began a concerted push to galvanize awareness and support for this global issue, six countries have committed to lead paint bans. And 12 countries, which together have a population of over one billion people, have made ambitious plans to conduct blood lead level surveys so they can identify clusters of lead poisoning among their own people and begin working on solutions.
And this is just the beginning.
I will tell you: I have been working for three decades in the international domain, seeking ways to improve and to save lives – and never in my career have I seen such a compelling, low-cost opportunity to make such a massive impact on a major global killer.
Today, we can come together and end centuries of inaction – so that kids around the world finally get the futures they deserve.
Thank you.