The communiqué released on June 26 states:
“We reaffirm our strong support to significantly reduce the number of maternal, newborn and under five child deaths as a matter of immediate humanitarian and development concern. Action is required on all factors that affect the health of women and children. This includes addressing gender inequality, ensuring women’s and children’s rights and improving education for women and girls.”     Other highlights in the communiqué include:

FUNDING:
- G8 members committed to mobilize $5 billion of additional funding over the next five years.
- G8 leaders say they “anticipate” that, over the period 2010-2015 the Muskoka Initiative will mobilize significantly greater than $10 billion.

POLICY:
- G8 leaders will assist developing countries to i) prevent 1.3 million deaths of children under five years of age; ii) prevent 64,000 maternal deaths; and iii) enable access to modern methods of family planning by an additional 12 million couples. These results will be achieved cumulatively between 2010-2015.
- The Initiative includes an accountability framework and reporting.
- G8 leaders want this Initiative to give added momentum to the UN-led process to develop a Joint Action Plan to Improve the Health of Women and Children.
- The G8 will support country-led efforts to achieve this objective by making the third voluntary replenishment conference of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria in October 2010 a success. And, they commit to promote integration of HIV and sexual and reproductive health, rights and services within the broader context of strengthening health systems.

Read full summary from Women Deliver

Photo: Allan Gichigi/IRIN

Sarah Boseley -The G20 summit at the end of this week must address the need for safe abortion if it is to bring down death rates in pregnancy, as the Canadian government has pledged - and it must deliver on its former pledge to keep people with HIV/Aids in Africa alive.

Never have the deaths of women in childbirth and the fate of their newborn babies been paid so much attention at so high a level. Hard on the heels of the Women Deliver conference in Washington two weeks ago, luminaries, movers and shakers from the UN, business, governments and civil society have assembled in London for the Pacific Health Summit, which has taken as this year’s theme maternal and newborn health. Conversations are going on among people in a position to make a difference - from the largest pharma companies in the world to major donors like USAID.

And the moment it ends, we are into the G20 summit, where the Canadian government has promised to make maternal and newborn health its legacy issue. It wants the world’s leading nations to sign up to a plan which includes better training for health workers, better nutrition for pregnant women, nursing mothers and their children, immunisation, clean water and sanitation.

Read full article by Sarah Boseley (Guardian UK)

Women waiting outside clinic. Photo: IRIN/Aubrey

Next to Ministers and  First Ladies, health experts, UN representatives, advocates and youth representatives, this year’s Women Deliver Conference that was held in Washington, D.C. from 7-9 June 2010 also hosted a Parliamentarians’ Forum for the first time which brought together more than 50 Parliamentarians.

“The biggest enemy of women’s health and rights is political indifference”, Jill Sheffield, President of Women Deliver remarked during the opening plenary session.

Ms. Safiye Çağar, Director IERD, UNFPA highlighted the important role Parliamentarians have in achieving maternal health and universal access to reproductive health until 2015. “You are responsible for listening to your constituents, to represent them adequately and to act as legislators”, Ms Çağar emphasised. Mr. Bert Koenders, former Minister for Development Co-operation of the Netherlands said that the role of Parliamentarians is underestimated. “Politicians need to break the silence that still surrounds MDG 5 and sexual and reproductive health and rights”, Koenders remarked.

The Parliamentarians’ Forum culminated in a Parliamentarians’ Statement. Amongst others, Parliamentarians called for additional US $12 billion a year to be invested in women and girls and  to actively work towards the establishment of a global funding mechanism for family planning, mothers and children with other international donors. The statement urges Ministers to establish realistic and verifiable annual action plans for reaching individual MDG targets with a special emphasis on MDG 5 to be presented at the UN High Level Meeting on the MDGs and commit to take a leading role in communicating the societal, economic, political and cultural benefits of investing in women and girls to key stakeholders. Parliamentarians were united in the necessity to pressure governments to deliver for women and girls, the need to reduce barriers for access to quality family planning services and the centrality this plays for the status of women in society as well as the need to improve co-operation between countries and continents.

Read full article from Women Deliver

Women Deliver

The Women Deliver 2010 conference ended on Wednesday with new energy and commitments for action for women’s health from members of parliament, young people and the rest of the more than 3,000 participants.

Women Deliver founder and president Jill Sheffield said the three-day gathering was, in Winston Churchill’s words, “not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning” in the drive to halt the global toll of women’s deaths and disabilities from pregnancy-related causes.

At least one woman dies every 90 seconds from such causes and another 20 suffer infection or disability, while four million newborns die every year. These grim numbers actually represent improvements over the last 20 years, during which many international gatherings have pledged investments in women that failed to materialize.

A comprehensive report tracking progress in maternal and child health was launched on June 8 at the Women Deliver conference. According to the Countdown to 2015 decade report (2000-2010), a lack of skilled attendants at birth accounts for two million preventable maternal deaths, stillbirths and newborn deaths each year, in spite of remarkable progress in some poor countries. The report argues that achieving MDGs 4 and 5 (on maternal and newborn health) is possible by the deadline year 2015, but only a dramatic acceleration of political commitment and financial investment can make it happen.

Read full article by Joanne Omang at womendeliver.org

Photo: Irin

For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number of women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980. Children were weighed by nurses and staff at the Mygome Orphanage in Khartoum, Sudan, in 2008.

The findings, published in the medical journal The Lancet, challenge the prevailing view of maternal mortality as an intractable problem that has defied every effort to solve it.

“The overall message, for the first time in a generation, is one of persistent and welcome progress,” the journal’s editor, Dr. Richard Horton, wrote in a comment accompanying the article, published online on Monday.

The study cited a number of reasons for the improvement: lower pregnancy rates in some countries; higher income, which improves nutrition and access to health care; more education for women; and the increasing availability of “skilled attendants” — people with some medical training — to help women give birth. Improvements in large countries like India and China helped to drive down the overall death rates.

Read full article from The New York Times