New partnership to support developing countries’ maternal health plans

22 September 2010

A groundbreaking international partnership to cut mother and child deaths in the developing world was announced by Andrew Mitchell today.

The UK will be joined by the US and Australian governments and the Gates Foundation in an alliance working with governments in developing countries to ensure their plans to save mothers and children’s lives are delivered.

The alliance, which will be officially announced at the MDG Summit in New York tomorrow, will focus on the most off track Millennium Development Goals (4 and 5) – both of which cover maternal health – with a preliminary focus on family planning. The Alliance will seek to support a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia to achieve their ambitions.

It will offer wide-ranging support for countries’ health plans – potentially ranging from supplying medicines and training midwives to building roads and improving access to new technologies – to plug gaps in the implementation of countries’ health plans.

Maternal health is a major issue in the developing world. In Nigeria, for example, the lifetime risk of a women dying from complications due to pregnancy and childbirth is 1 in 23 compared to 1 in 4,700 in the UK.

New UN estimates are that in 2008, 50,000 women in Nigeria died from complications due to pregnancy and childbirth.

The US, UK, Australia and Gates Foundation Alliance will:

• Work quickly to identify priority countries to work with;
• Help countries to scale up successful work to increase access to reproductive and maternal services including family planning;
• Support the global target to provide an additional 100 million people in the developing world with access to family planning;
• Increase the number of births in developing countries attended by skilled midwives; and,
• Improve access for mothers and newborns to high quality post-natal care. 

Partnership working between the UK and other donor agencies has already had an impact in the developing world. In many countries the UK works closely with other partners to design and implement health programmes. The alliance provides an opportunity to concentrate efforts around common goals and agreed priorities.

The alliance will welcome additional partners, such as other governments, foundations and NGOs, in each country were it works.  It hopes other international partners will join either globally or in specific countries in order to strengthen commitments to women and children’s health in the poorest places.

Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, said:

“It is an international scandal that more than 350,000 women die in the developing world every year from complications in pregnancy or child birth that can be easily prevented. This groundbreaking alliance is an opportunity to support national governments to deliver plans that will make a difference to millions of families in poor countries.

“Through this alliance we will be able to plug gaps in services that affect people on the ground, often women and children in remote communities. We will take what works and replicate it to achieve the best results.

“Each country we work with will have its own challenges but the expertise being brought to the table by each partner means governments will be able to develop high quality plans with the confidence that help is at hand to deliver them and to work to overcome technical and operational challenges such recruiting skilled professional and improving access for people in remote communities.”

The alliance will be launched at the UN on Wednesday when Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, is joined by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and Melinda Gates as part of the UN Secretary General’s health meeting.

Last week, the Government announced that the UK would commit at the Millennium Development Goal Summit to doubling the number of women and newborn lives saved by 2015 through:

• overhauling all our aid programmes to see what we can do differently in order to save more women and babies. We will be putting women at the heart of our development agenda by emulating for example, evidence from recent research in Bangladesh where more women gave birth safely because the Government provided tokens they could exchange for midwifery services;
• pushing forward into new ways of working, for example looking at what the non-state and private sector can offer us as well seeing as opportunities through new technology. Mobile phone technology, for example, is helping more women give birth safely. We will work with partners to test a range of new technologies from mobile phones and other digital innovations, to new ideas for emergency transport - such as motorcycle ambulances in Malawi, to health information systems, to clinical technologies;
• putting a greater emphasis on providing aid based on results. For example, a recent project in Rwanda using this model saw a sharp rise in the number of women using a clinic to give birth and take up ante natal care which undoubtedly saved lives;
• seeking the views of health workers, academics, charities and international partners to design a new business plan that will provide a framework for the UK government’s work across the world on reproductive, maternal and newborn health; and,
• using the bilateral and multilateral aid reviews that we are conducting as an opportunity to maximise the impact of our aid work on women and babies. 

By doing this, the UK aid will save the lives of at least 50,000 women in pregnancy and childbirth, a quarter of a million newborn babies and enable 10 million couples to access modern methods of family planning by 2015.