Updates

By: Melinda French Gates
Originally posted by: the Impatient Optimists

Melinda recently returned from a three-day trip to Bangladesh. She, along with Nick Kristof, agreed to answer readers’ questions about development issues focusing on that part of the world. Here is the first installment of the Q&A session reposted from Kristof's New York Times blog "On the Ground." Read more...

Earlier this month at the mHealth Summit in Washington, DC, the Innovation Working Group, part of the UN Secretary General’s Every Woman Every Child Strategy, and the mHealth Alliance announced 8 winners of grants to support mobile health programs. The grants will fund innovative mobile technology projects that have the potential to improve maternal and child health globally.

The projects are based in low-income countries with high maternal and child mortality rates. They aim to improve evaluation design, enhance health information sharing, and increase the capabilities of technologies that help clinical decision-making. Over the two-year grant period, the grantees will build partnerships, scale up their projects to national levels or extend their reach to new communities. The grant program is generously supported by NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, with technical support from the mHealth Alliance. Read more...

By: Alexander Jackson, originally posted on Baltimore Business Journal

A Johns Hopkins University affiliate has been awarded $1.6 million from the GE Foundation to support the development of lifesaving technologies for women and children in developing countries.

Jhpiego, a Baltimore-based international nonprofit, will use the money to create new products through its Innovation Development Program. Centered on maternal and child health, the program focuses on early-stage innovation and then, for selected projects, field-testing and product introduction. Read more...

By: Victoria Hale, PhD, CEO at Medicines360

Most people have one life changing, “ah-ha” moment in their lives, but in my case, I had two. The first moment came when I was sitting in the back of a New York City taxi, and the driver asked me what I did for a living. When I told him that I was a pharmaceutical scientist, he said, “Oh, you have all the money!” And, in that moment, my first company, OneWorld Health, was born.

OneWorld Health is a first-generation non-profit pharmaceutical company created as an innovative, gutsy initiative to develop drugs to treat people with neglected tropical diseases. This charity model is entirely dependent on others—that is, on large grants from philanthropists and on the for-profit pharmaceutical industry for the delivery of medicines to the poor. Read more...

By: Rati Bishnoi, Special Projects Intern at Women Deliver

Could chickpeas be a potential solution for meeting two of Ethiopia’s biggest challenges: child malnourishment and an underperforming economy?

PepsiCo, the World Food Programme (WFP), and USAID believe so. That’s why the company is entering into an innovative public-private partnership with the WFP and USAID to promote food and economic security in the east African nation. Under Enterprise EthioPEA, the three organizations will work with nearly 10,000 Ethiopian farmers to double chickpea yields by utilizing modern agricultural practices and better irrigation techniques. Read more...

By: Madeline Taskier, Partnership Coordinator at Women Deliver

By 2030, more than 5 billion people will be living in urban settings, a trend that will have the greatest effect in Asia and Africa. Health care services in urban areas have not caught up with the rapid pace of population growth, leaving much of the urban poor without access to healthcare.

This week, at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Maternal Health Task Force, UNFPA, and USAID co-hosted a policy dialogue series focusing on the state of maternal health in urban slums. Despite the relative proximity and concentration of health centers in urban compared to rural areas, poor women are still not able to access quality maternal health care. Read more...

March 8^th will mark the 100^th anniversary of International Women’s Day, a day when thousands of events are held throughout the world to inspire women and celebrate achievements. To commemorate, CARE USA will host the CARE Conference and International Women’s Day Celebration March 8 – 10, 2011 in Washington, DC. Read more...

By: Mariko Rasmussen, Communications Specialist at Women Deliver

While my previous posts have focused on ‘solutions’ in the Global South, today we’re focusing on maternal health in the United States where it is getting more dangerous to be a pregnant woman. In 2007, the United States ranked 41 out of 171 countries for lifetime risk of death from pregnancy related causes. That means 40 countries had better maternal health outcomes than the U.S. In 2008, the United States dropped to 50, behind countries including: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republic of Korea, Kuwait, Qatar, and Puerto Rico. Today, in the U.S., 1 in 2,100 women will die in pregnancy and childbirth. Read more...

Health Care in its Social Context from SternerTurner Media on Vimeo.

By: Madeline Taskier, Partnership Coordinator at Women Deliver

The Preston Auditorium at the World Bank is an unlikely place for a hip-hop concert--especially a concert with a significant focus on women and girls. However, yesterday I attended the Adolescent Girls Initiative (AGI) Event hosted by the World Bank and the Nike Foundation where energy and optimism flowed through the venue as passionate activists, performers, and leaders came to celebrate progress for adolescent girls. Read more...

By: Mariko Rasmussen, Program Assistant for Women Deliver; originally posted at the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases blog, End the Neglect

I am blessed to live in a part of the world where I am more likely to view a woman dying in childbirth as a thematic element to a piece of fiction than to see it happen in my own family or have it happen to myself. Similarly, when I think of a three-foot worm growing under a person’s skin, it sounds like a horror movie or nightmare rather than a diagnosis. But in many places, maternal mortality and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), like guinea worm, continue to ravage communities, especially thriving in impoverished settings. NTDs are a group of disabling, disfiguring, and deadly diseases affecting more than 1.4 billion people worldwide living on less than $1.25 a day. Often, women and children carry much of the NTD burden, and NTDs can directly impact maternal mortality rates, such as hookworm’s contribution to anemia in pregnant women. This disparity between rich and poor is unacceptable – health is a human right. Read more...

By: Janna Oberdorf, Communications Manager for Women Deliver

“You need to keep your doors open to speak to us. You are accountable to the people who elected you,” Lysa John from the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) told the leaders of the G8 at a press conference for the Make Poverty History campaign this morning.

Accountability is a key issue in both this year’s G8/G20 summits, and in the larger context of providing the essential services to all women in developing countries to meet MDG5 by 2015. In order to truly reduce maternal deaths, governments need to follow through on the promises they’ve made at previous international and national summits. As civil society, we need to keep watch. Governments and the international community must commit to developing better monitoring and accountability mechanisms and channels for community engagement that address all the many barriers to maternal and newborn health care if we are going to make progress.

source: The Huffington Post

By Helen Clark, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme

As Prime Minister of my country for nine years and the first woman to lead the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), I believe that achieving gender equality is not only morally right, but also catalytic to development as a whole, creating political, economic, and social opportunities for women which benefit individuals, communities, countries, and the world.

This strong belief underpins my contribution at the Women Deliver event in Washington, DC during a discussion on women and power with an impressive panel of powerful women, including the creator of the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington; former Chilean Prime Minister Michelle Bachelet; actress Ashley Judd; and Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor and Assistant to Barack Obama for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement.

Women Deliver was launched in 2007, and works globally to focus attention on fulfilling what is called "Millennium Development Goal #5." This goal calls for a reduction in maternal mortality and universal access to reproductive health globally. more...

By Dr. Fred Sai, co-host of Women Deliver 2010 and former advisor to the Ghanaian government on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS. You can follow the live stream of the Women Deliver 2010 conference from June 7th to 9th at www.womendeliver.org/webcast.

Originally posted at ONE blog.

This March, the Lancet released new statistics that revealed an unprecedented drop in the number of women who die every year during pregnancy and childbirth. The study found that from 1980 to 2008, maternal deaths globally have fallen from 500,000 each year to 340,000. Having spent some 40 years working on women and children’s health in Ghana and across Africa, I welcomed this progress. But as the world celebrated, I also couldn’t help but wonder, “Where is Africa?”

At the Women Deliver 2010 conference, White Ribbon Alliance along with UNFPA will be debuting a multimedia exhibition called, "Stories of Mothers Saved." To celebrate the exhibit, they are hosting a countdown to Women Deliver with blog posts from people all over the world who have contributed to their multimedia exhibition. These blog posts include, Francois Zoungrana from Burkina Faso, Jameel Aldrbashi from Palestine, Smita Maniar from India, and Ahsan Mehboob from Pakistan.