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Developing Nations Team Up to Protect Women, Children

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 26 2014 (IPS) - A woman lies on the earthen floor of a modest hut, bracing for the next contraction. Another swaddles a newborn baby in strips of cloth torn from a sheet. A continent away, a young mother cuts her own umbilical cord.

These scenes do not align with the modern image of childbirth – images of hospitals, skilled attendants and medical equipment – but they do reflect how millions of women bring children into the world every single day.

New research by Save the Children estimates that 40 million women give birth each year without trained help. Over a million newborns die within their first 24 hours, largely due to poor sanitation and a lack of access to basic medical supplies. An additional 1.2 million babies are stillborn, life strangled out of them by maternal infections that could easily be prevented.

Just 674 days ahead of the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – eight international development goals agreed upon by the world community back in 2000 – United Nations member states are taking a good, hard look at their progress on poverty-reduction targets.

With the clock ticking, many nations are stepping up efforts to improve the lot of their poorest people. On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sat down with members of Partners in Population and Development (PPD) at the U.N. headquarters in New York to discuss the role South-South collaboration can play in advancing women and children’s health.

“South-South collaboration is more than just economic cooperation, it is about exchanging knowledge, experience and expertise,” Ban said at the high-level dinner. “It is the foundation of a global and inclusive partnership for action.”

Ban himself recently spearheaded the Every Woman Every Child movement, which aims to save the lives of 16 million women and children, prevent 33 million unwanted pregnancies, end stunting in 88 million children, and safeguard over 120 million children from pneumonia by 2015.

The new South-South partnership will mobilize the initiative’s 40-billion-dollar budget in new and efficient ways by engaging PPD’s network of 26 developing states, which collectively comprise 57 percent of the world’s population.

“PPD is committing to ensure that our programmes and activities will promote inclusion of Every Woman and Every Child as the beneficiary of all our policy and programme efforts,” PPD Executive Director Dr. Joe Thomas told IPS. “The proposed collaboration will open the door for more efficient efforts to reduce maternal mortality and improve child health.”

For instance, PPD is co-hosting the 12th International congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, slated to be held in Dhaka in November 2015, in collaboration with the Bangladeshi Ministry of Health.

In addition, PPD works with the Partnerships for Maternal New-born Child Health (PMNCH), WHO’s Gender, Equity and Rights Mainstreaming, and Ageing and life course departments. “These partnerships will provide an avenue for resource mobilisation for reproductive, maternal, new-born and child health (RMNCH) programmes,” Thomas said.

PPD focuses its efforts primarily on six key areas including knowledge sharing, capacity building, commodity and technology transfers, advocacy and policy dialog, partnerships and resource mobilisation, and diplomacy between member countries.

Just this morning, one of PPD’s member states announced it was on track for meeting the MDG target of bringing the under-five mortality rate to just 42 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2015.

Anuradha Gupta, joint secretary of the Indian ministry of health, said Wednesday the country improved its infant mortality ratio from 114 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 52 per 1,000 births in 2012. “So it looks hopeful that by 2015, we will be able to reach…the set target of MDG 4,” he added.

 
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