Every spring, thousands of government officials, journalists, civil society representatives and other interested observers gather in Washington D.C., for the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

As part of those meetings, the Civil Society Forum conducts a series of events hosted or co-hosted by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups to foster creative dialogue among civil society participants, government delegates and senior World Bank and IMF officials.

Timothy Opobo, a child protection coordinator with ChildFund Uganda, served as a panelist at the session focused on gender issues. He used the opportunity to profile ChildFund’s work in this arena, and, specifically, to discuss the on-the-ground impact of World Bank projects on gender issues, including gender-based violence and education.

These are important conversations to have. Right now, ChildFund and other NGOs and civil society organizations are joining for the “50 Days of Action for Women and Girls” campaign. From prevention of violence against women to improving the health of women and girls worldwide, it’s important that we advance progress in U.S. foreign policy efforts on these issues and make them visible on the world stage.

Project RESTART: Sharing a video of my recent trip to Afghanistan, where I met with children and families who are working to rebuild their lives. Much progress has been made in recent years, but we still have a long way to go.

I heard that miniskirts were worn in Kabul in the 1970s. I don’t know if that’s true, but the Afghanistan I saw two weeks ago was far different from those years. And, yet, the country is also far different, and much improved, from 2001, when ChildFund first began operations there, following 20 years of war.

Although the last 12 years have brought more fighting in the effort to restore security, improvements also have been made. In 2001, only 9 percent of Afghans had access to basic health services; now, more than 60 percent do. As a result, the rate of children dying under age 5 has dropped by 44 percent. This is not just a statistic. These are boys and girls, with names and faces and moms and dads, now living to see their fifth birthday.

Bigger gains can be found in the maternal mortality rate, which has declined by 80 percent. Afghans are living longer – life expectancy has improved from 44 to 60 years in the last 10 years. As I wrote in earlier posts, the education system, almost destroyed by the Taliban particularly for girls, has come back to life for all children, regardless of gender.

To see other improvements for women, you don’t have to look any further than ChildFund’s own office – which is led by an Afghan woman who manages many male staff. In the country’s parliament, 27 percent of the seats are now held by women (as compared to 18 percent in the U.S. Congress). Afghan woman now hold three cabinet posts. By the end of 2013, it is estimated that 30 percent of government employees will be women.

This doesn’t mean the future is all rosy for females, or for all Afghans. Not by any means.

It was cold in Afghanistan during my trip, the kind of wet cold that gets into your bones. The temperature had warmed up the week of my visit to the low 30s (F) during the day, which wasn’t too bad. The bigger problem for children is not having adequate indoor heating. The buildings – and people – never really warm up from the nights’ even colder temperatures. Indoors, I kept my coat on. From classrooms in Jalalabad to embassies in Kabul – every place I visited sought to warm their spaces with portable heaters, small electrical space heaters or ceramic ones fueled by wood, coal or gas.

Like other women, I covered my head with a scarf and wore a long, loose coat that didn’t define my body shape and allowed me to layer on extra clothes for warmth. On the day my plane arrived in Kabul, I noticed all the expat women on board pulling out scarfs and covering their heads before deplaning. As I boarded the plane to leave Kabul at the end of the week, women did the opposite.

It’s likely that some citizens will again leave the country this year, ahead of the projected U.S. troop pullout in 2014. But most Afghan children won’t be boarding any planes. The majority of the families I met during my visit will be staying; they can’t afford otherwise. You lose a lot when you become a refugee.

So we need to stay engaged in Afghanistan. And for now, we should not focus on the fact that women continue to wear head scarfs not miniskirts. It’s more critical to recognize that girls are in school, children are celebrating their fifth birthdays and women are working and beginning to hold positions of importance. It’s vitally important that we continue to support programs that build the health, educational and economic systems of the country, so the gains made during these past 10 years are built on and not destroyed. We have to help Afghanistan move beyond being “the worst place to be born” for children.

Since I have returned from Afghanistan, many people have asked me what security was like in the country.

Although security is an everyday concern, it doesn’t stop life from moving on, albeit slowly and with some serious interruptions. The half-day gun battle that I mentioned in an earlier blog was unusual even for Kabul. Explosions happen, but extended battles between insurgents and the government forces do not generally occur in the city. All the officials I met with talked about the scheduled 2014 pull-out of U.S. forces, wondering aloud what the impact will be on the country.

One key to being safe is to keep as low a profile as possible – people do that as well as businesses. ChildFund Afghanistan avoids using well-known, highly visible hotels for guests, opting instead for low-frills hotels on nondescript streets. My hotel, and every restaurant I ate at, would be impossible for any newcomer to find unaided. None of these establishments post the business name or advertising signs out front. All are surrounded by high walls, with rows of metal gates that blend in with nearby apartment buildings.

After guests clear the mental fences, most restaurants have two to three security doors to pass through. At one restaurant, you knock at the last door and gain entrance after you’re viewed through a peep hole in the center of the door, very 1920s speak-easy style. Once inside the compounds, you find gardens and good food but few other guests. I think most residents of Kabul prefer eating in the security of their own homes.

For my visits with U.N., U.S. embassy and other government officials and when traveling to airports, the state of security was much higher. All buildings are set far back from the road with elaborate security precautions. For one meeting, we drove (slowly) down a double figure-eight style pathway lined with cement pillars. All offices in which we met were very simple; some organizations have converted shipping containers into offices and (I heard) even into staff housing.

Although the site of my field visit, Jalalabad, is accessible by road from Kabul, the trip takes several hours and would have required an overnight stop. Cars are vulnerable to attack on the road. Being cautious, our team decided to fly to Jalalabad for our one-day visit. Although I was a bit disappointed at the shortness of the trip, I learned that few western NGO leaders have been able to travel outside Kabul recently. So I considered myself lucky, that is until I saw the small one-engine plane we were taking. I have flown internationally all my life, but I have to admit I get very nervous flying in small planes. I didn’t spend much time looking out the window, but I could see that we flew mostly over incredible mountainous areas, including the famous Tora Bora area where a battle ensued with Osama bin Laden in 2001. The flight was worth it, however, because I got to see ChildFund’s programs for children.

Before my Afghanistan trip, very few people knew I was going. Part of the secrecy was for security reasons, and I also didn’t want to worry my extended family.

With good planning and a cautious approach, my trip went fine and our ChildFund team was able to accomplish most of our goals for the visit. A week later I don’t think we would have been as fortunate. Many security incidents happened the following week, including the kidnapping of an NGO worker in Kabul.

In a very, very tough living environment, I met many impressive Afghan, U.S. and other foreign nationals working together to make life better for children and Afghanistan as a whole. Particularly after U.S. troops leave next year, Afghans and aid workers will continue to need our support to make a better world for children in Afghanistan, “the worst place for children to be born.”

I spent last week in Kabul, Afghanistan, visiting ChildFund’s programs. It was a visit I had looked forward to for a long time. We hear about the war in Afghanistan all the time in the news, but I was eager to learn what everyday life was like for Afghan children and families.

ChildFund has been working in Afghanistan since November 2001 and has assisted more than half a million children and family members during this last decade or so. I was there to see the programs for myself, discuss issues with staff and meet with government and U.N. officials.

We started out the week with a bang, literally. Just before dawn on Monday, gunmen armed with suicide vests attacked the headquarters of the Kabul traffic department, which happened to be located close to the ChildFund office. Fighting continued until mid-afternoon while the whole city stood still, unsure if there would be a second attack elsewhere. All of our plans were put on hold and we stayed in our hotel. By 2 p.m., our staff felt safe enough to meet me at the hotel and by 3 p.m., we were on the road to keep our last scheduled meeting of the day with the U.S. Ambassador. Although security (and electricity) is unpredictable in this city, it doesn’t stop everyday life from moving on.

I met a lot of impressive people during the week: our female Afghanistan National Director, Palwasha Hassan, a known advocate in her country for women and children’s rights; a Shura council member in one of our program areas who is a strong supporter of ChildFund’s educational programs; a U.N. worker who confided she was confronting some corruption head-on and was concerned about the consequences.

The bottom line from all of the people I talked with – Afghanistan is doing much better than it was a decade ago, but it still has a very long way to go. Many Afghans who left the country in the 1980s (during the 10-year war between the U.S.-backed Mujahideen forces and the Soviet-backed Afghan government) or from 1989 to 2001 (during the rise and fall of the extremist Taliban government) have come home during the last several years. I met only one staff member who had stayed throughout these 30 years of fighting. Everyone is unsure what will happen after the U.S. troops pull out next year, but that’s not stopping people from getting on with their lives.

The city of Kabul is teeming with 5 million residents (and their cars) – we hit traffic jams wherever we went. Small shops stocked with goods can be found all over the city. I noticed two large banquet halls advertising their specialty: weddings. One of our staff members just got engaged – his wife-to-be will soon return from Pakistan – another Afghan returning home.

Afghanistan has been declared by UNICEF as “the worst place to be born” due to the extreme forms of deprivation and exclusion experienced by Afghan infants and young children. My experience last week brought that point home.

Coming up: My visit with children in ChildFund’s programs in rural Afghanistan.

My son’s birthday is this week. As a mother, you never forget the birthday of your child. I remember once being in a meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. I told my friends at the meeting that I remember exactly where I was 15 years ago that week – waiting in Nairobi for my first child to be born. I always enjoyed my kids’ birthday parties over the years (though I admit they were a bit crazy when the kids were little and everyone would run wild). My daughter’s eighth birthday party in Cairo, Egypt, was very special. The dozen or so friends she invited represented about seven nationalities – so “Happy Birthday” got sung many times in many languages.

Last week I spoke to a women’s club. One of the stories I told them was about a woman I remember meeting many years ago in a small village in Bangladesh. She told me she had given birth to 12 children and 11 of them had died shortly after birth; only one survived. I asked her what she did different with that one child. She explained that instead of using the traditional razor blade to cut the umbilical cord, she cut it with her teeth.

Pretty shocking isn’t it? In some ways, almost too hard to believe. But at that time, the majority of rural women gave birth at home, with the help of a traditional birth attendant. The common practice was to use a razor blade, often one that was used and rusty. Dung was then sometimes used to cover the cut. As a result, newborns often got neonatal tetanus and died within the first month of life.

Globally, neonatal mortality has declined 32 percent in the last two decades—on average, about 1.8 percent a year, according to World Health Organization data. But that rate of decline is happening much slower than under-five mortality rates (2.5 percent per year).

A 2012 report warns that “with the proportion of under-five deaths during the neonatal period increasing in every region and almost all countries, systematic action is required by governments and partners to reach women and babies with effective care.”

One focus of ChildFund’s maternal and child health programs is to support mothers in having safe deliveries and babies that are born healthy. In our Senegal programs, for example, trained community health volunteers meet with groups of mothers to provide ideas for infant stimulation and improved nutrition. We want to foster a strong mother-child bond, especially around breastfeeding, which is critical to child survival. Our community health volunteers also pay home visits to provide one-on-one counseling and support to the mother on feeding, hygiene and disease prevention.

In thinking about my own son’s birthday, I pause to remember that mother from years past. I hope her one surviving baby grew up healthy and happy. Through the years, I hope the mother was able to focus less on the tremendous losses she suffered and more on the child who survived. And I hope each year, in her own way, she celebrated that child’s birthday.