Ninety-nine per cent of preventable maternal deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Maternal health, wellbeing, and survival must remain a central goal and an investment priority in the post-2015 framework for sustainable development to ensure that progress continues and accelerates, with a focus on reducing inequities and discrimination. Attention to maternal mortality and morbidity must be accompanied by improvements along the continuum of care for women and children, including commitments to voluntary family planning and reproductive health care and newborn and child survival.
Although widespread progress has been made in recent decades, women, children and adolescents still face numerous health challenges. Causes of preventable death and ill-health include communicable and non-communicable diseases, mental illness, injuries and violence, malnutrition, complications of pregnancy and childbirth, unwanted pregnancy and lack of access to, or use of, quality health-care and life-saving commodities. Underlying structural causes include poverty, gender inequality (manifested in discrimination in laws, policies and practice) and marginalization (based on age, ethnicity, race, caste, national origin, immigration status, disability, sexual orientation and other grounds) that are all human rights violations. The survival, health and well-being of women, children, and adolescents are essential to ending extreme poverty, promoting development and resilience, and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Other factors that significantly influence health and well-being include: genetics; families, communities and institutions; underlying unequal gender norms within households; income and education levels; social and political contexts; the workplace; and the environment.
Delivering interventions that successfully address the most pressing public health concerns facing women, children, and families is vital. Ensuring that every mother and child survives and thrives hinges on a combination of high-impact interventions – including quality antenatal, delivery and postnatal care for mothers and their newborns, prevention of mother to-child transmission of HIV, immunization to protect children from infectious diseases, access to adequate and nutritious food, and addressing the gender-based barriers to healthcare. By preventing death and disability and improving health outcomes over the lifespan, these interventions can reduce health care costs and provide long-term economic value to society.
Youth Leaders for Nutrition Advocacy Toolkit
The health and nutrition of adolescents are becoming global priorities, and your participation is so important. You have the best understanding of young people’s needs, how to address them, and how to get them involved. This toolkit was created through a participatory and collaborative process with Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Youth Leaders for Nutrition, supported by Save the Children, GAIN, and Anthrologica. This toolkit will help youth design, develop, and implement an advocacy strategy for improving adolescent nutrition.
Every Woman Every Child: Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health
The survival, health and well-being of women, children and adolescents are essential to ending extreme poverty, promoting development and resilience, and achieving the SDGs. The Global Strategy takes a life-course approach that aims for the highest attainable standards of health and well-being—physical, mental and social— at every age. In recognition of this, the updated Global Strategy sets out a vision, guiding principles, three objectives and a set of core targets, in line with the SDG framework. It identifies key actions and lays the groundwork for country-led implementation planning. The Strategy is fully aligned with the priorities of the SDGs, and builds on the evidence of what is needed and what works. It encompasses all locations, social groups and settings, in particular marginalized, excluded and hard-to-reach communities.
A Future for the World’s Children? A WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission
The health and wellbeing of children now and in the future depends on overcoming new challenges that are escalating at such speed as to threaten the progress and successes of the past two decades in child health. The climate emergency is rapidly undermining the future survival of all species, and the likelihood of a world in which all children enjoy their right to health appears increasingly out of reach. A second existential threat that is more insidious has emerged: predatory commercial exploitation that is encouraging harmful and addictive activities that are extremely deleterious to young people’s health.The WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission lays the foundations for a new global movement for child health that addresses these two crises and presents high-level recommendations that position children at the centre of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Strategies Toward Ending Preventable Maternal Mortality (EPMM)
The EPMM targets and strategies are grounded in a human rights approach to maternal and newborn health, and focus on eliminating significant inequities that lead to disparities in access, quality and outcomes of care within and between countries. Concrete political commitments and financial investments by country governments and development partners are necessary to meet the targets and carry out the strategies for EPMM.
State of the World’s Fathers: Report
This third State of the World’s Fathers report is rooted firmly in a feminist analysis of care and the belief that unpaid care work must be valued equally with paid work and shared equally between men and women. It focuses specifically on men, and on men who are fathers or caregivers, because this is a part of gender equality and children’s rights where massive shifts are needed. Worldwide, there remains a widespread expectation that caring is women’s work, and men’s role as breadwinners should largely keep them exempt from any household chores or work that includes providing care. The report reveals new research on men’s caregiving from 11 countries, with additional cross-country analysis of data from over 30 countries. It calls for men’s uptake of their full share of the world’s childcare and domestic work – across all societies and relationships – to advance gender equality.
Uganda Improvement Collaborative: Integration of Family Planning into Maternal and Neonatal Health Programming
This technical brief describes how E2A worked with the USAID-funded STRIDES project to introduce an Improvement Collaborative in 10 districts of Uganda. The Improvement Collaborative is a structured quality improvement approach that organizes a number of teams or health facilities to work together for a period of 18 to 24 months to achieve significant improvement in a specific area of care. This Improvement Collaborative focused on best practices in family planning and maternal and neonatal health. The best practices were implemented in two phases: first, in 10 facilities, and then in an additional 36 facilities.