Child to Child’s co-founder, Professor Morley, has changed children’s lives
Prof. Morley was a visionary who cared passionately about children in countries across the world.
Only a few years after becoming a doctor, David Morley decided to work on health care problems in the developing world, starting in Nigeria. Professor June Lloyd of the British Paediatric Association described his work thus: “In the five years that he was in Imesi it is no exaggeration to say that he transformed the approach to the health care of children in the developing world. He showed that infant mortality could be cut by over 80 per cent, not by the introduction of modern medicine and the building of hospitals, but by education and use of locally available resources.”
In Imesi-Ile, Dr Morley started an Under-Fives Clinics run by local personnel and trained local women to immunise the children. By 1965, this was the very first community in the world to record the eradication of measles through vaccination. The same year, he started the organisation TALC (Teaching Aids at Low Cost), which has been distributing millions of teaching books, slides and accessories to health and community workers, throughout the 
developing world, ever since.
Returning from Nigeria he worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and then took over a UNICEF-sponsored course on child health for developing countries. This led to the formation of the Tropical Child Health Unit at the Institute of Child Health in London. Later this became the Centre for International Child Health, CICH, which still follows David’s innovatory precepts.
Together with his colleague Dr Hugh Hawes, Dr Morley created Child to Child in 1978 to further improve children’s health in developing countries through enhancing children’s role and place in their community.
He died on 2nd July 2009, aged 86 years.
Among other honours, Dr Morley received in 2002 the Dawson Williams Memorial Prize by the British Medical Association, in recognition of outstanding contributions to tropical paediatrics and child health in developing countries; in 2003 the Beacon prize for lifetime achievement, for contribution to child healthcare in the developing world. He was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
His major publications include Paediatric Priorities in the Developing World (1973) and See How They Grow (1979, in collaboration with Margaret Woodland.
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