Disadvantaged people share many of the same problems, the same needs, and the same hopes no matter where they are—in Africa, in Asia, in North or South America, in the developed or the developing world. The way problems are solved, needs are met, and hopes are fulfilled in one setting may thus have a bearing on other places miles, even continents away. For that reason, the Ford Foundation works to encourage the generation and sharing of knowledge across national boundaries, to build institutions that will facilitate transnational learning and sharing, and to seek productive interchange between Foundation programs in the United States and throughout the developing world. In this essay, I would like to describe some program areas in which transnational problems, issues, and approaches are especially prominent.

The Transnational Perspective

Since 1951, the Foundation has worked overseas as well as in the United States. Indeed, approximately one third of our program budget is allocated for activities outside the United States. It should also be noted that the Foundation's goals and approaches to problems at home and overseas are, broadly speaking, the same: to improve human welfare by supporting the generation and sharing of knowledge and experience at the local, regional, and national levels; to help remove barriers that prevent people from acting in their own and their communities' best long-term interests; and to create organizations and incentives that encourage disadvantaged people to help each other and themselves. I might add that the organization of the Foundation's program staff into a single program division has encouraged us to address issues from a transnational point of view and enabled us to take maximum advantage of the presence of Foundation staff overseas and of the natural links between our work in the United States and our work abroad.

One area in which need knows no national boundaries is the plight of disadvantaged children. Infant mortality has been declining in all but the poorest countries in the past thirty years, but it is still unacceptably high in most of the developing world. In the Third World, one child in four dies before reaching school age—a total of twelve to eighteen million deaths each year. Although overall child mortality rates are much lower in the United States, the death rates in some depressed U.S. communities are comparable to those in many developing countries. For example, in 1980, in a rural county in Tennessee, infant mortality was 31.5 per 1,000 live births; the infant mortality rate in Malaysia was 30.3 per 1,000. Another dimension of the problem in the United States is the disparity in the rates of infant death and sickness of white and minority children. Low birth weight—a key predictor of health problems in early life—is more than twice as common among black infants as among white infants in this country.

Through its Child Survival/Fair Start for Children program, the