USAID chief Alfonso Lenhardt to visit India this week

WASHINGTON: USAID chief Alfonso Lenhardt is visiting India this week to attend a global conference of health ministers and practitioners on child and maternal deaths and launch the premiere of a film on girl's education.

Kicking off his India travel from Mumbai, the acting administrator of US Agency for International Development will launch the premiere of the film on girl's education, "Girl Rising: Woh Padhegi, Woh Udegi", and tour a Tata lab as part of the agency's focus on innovation, an official statement said today.

In New Delhi, Lenhardt will join Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Third Global Call to Action Summit 2015, a conference of health ministers, practitioners and global leaders to share best practices and reaffirm their commitment for ending preventable child and maternal deaths.

The second annual Acting on the Call Report will be released at the summit.

The report is a status update on the first report, which detailed how USAID will join partners to save 15 million children and 600,000 women by 2020.

'Girl Rising: Woh Padhegi, Woh Udegi' is a film by Academy Award nominee Richard E Robbins.

It is the centre piece a USAID public-private partnership, Girl Rising; ENGAGE, an international campaign for girls' education and empowerment that uses the power of storytelling to ignite people to take action.

From India, Lenhardt will travel to Bangladesh where he will visit several USAID field projects near Bagherat that are advancing Presidential Initiatives in health and climate change. He will also meet several government officials in Dhaka.