 Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda challenged global leaders at the World Economic Forum to tackle maternal and infant mortality in a new comprehensive framework of cooperation. “Only joint action can achieve the kind of progress that such action has made against infectious diseases,” he said.
Read the press release by the Japanese Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning.
DAVOS, Switzerland – Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has challenged global leaders at the World Economic Forum to tackle maternal and infant mortality rates with the same creative cooperation they are employing against major infectious diseases.
In a special address to the annual gathering of influential policy-makers, Fukuda noted that after more than seven years of world action to achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015, progress against mothers’ deaths seems to have stalled.
“The issues of safe motherhood and health of children under five years of age in particular remain as serious as before, with some 500,000 pregnant women and 10 million children under five years dying annually,” he said. “Another important issue is the shortage of human resources in the health field.”
Fukuda said his aim is “changing these situations rapidly and significantly.” He called for “comprehensive cooperation in global health” to raise the overall level of national health care systems, with the hope that such initiative would become “an exemplary model of a new form of international cooperation.”
Fukuda has already announced that investment in women and in lowering maternal mortality rates will be a central theme of the Group of 8 Summit Conference next July in Hokkaido Toyako, Japan, which is to focus on development worldwide. He noted at Davos that at the 2000 G8 Summit, the focus on infectious diseases soon led to establishment of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis, which he said had saved 2.5 million lives.
“Such efforts cannot be shouldered by the governments of the G8 alone,” he said. “We must instead formulate a framework for action to raise the overall level of [national] health care systems, with the participation of all relevant stakeholders.” The Global Health Initiative, launched at Davos in 2002 by then-United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, works to spark public-private partnerships to improve national health care systems and would be a likely part of any such effort.
In Japan, the Japanese Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning welcomed Fukuda’s proposal as adding “an important momentum to advance global health that our advocacy efforts generated.” The non-governmental organization pledged willingness to help formulate the framework for action.
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