2017 Acting on the Call Summit: Celebrating Progress and Identifying Next Steps
USAID and partners are now closer to reaching our goal to save 15 million children and 600,000 women by 2020
As we wrap up a successful Acting on the Call Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I am so excited about the progress we’ve all made in saving the lives of mothers and children throughout 25 countries.
In June 2012, the Governments of Ethiopia, India and the United States, along with UNICEF, sparked the global movement to end preventable child and maternal death within generation. Global health leaders convened in Washington D.C. at the Child Survival Call to Action to agree on the global goal of ending preventable child deaths.
Shortly after the Call to Action, this goal was expanded to include ending preventable child and maternal deaths, and we’ve since seen rapid and remarkable progress, and uptake of high-impact interventions.
Nearly 180 governments pledged to scale up efforts, and over 400 civil society and faith-based organizations also pledged to accelerate efforts to prevent unnecessary deaths. Nineteen countries launched national strategies or scorecards to prioritize and track efforts around child and maternal survival. These goals have since been written into the Sustainable Development Goals.
In 2014, USAID released its first annual Acting on the Call report that laid out country-specific roadmaps to scale up high-impact interventions to save 15 million children and 600,000 women in then-24 priority countries. Annual reports and a series of events held in Washington, New Delhi and Addis Ababa served to update progress, align our actions, maintain global attention and drive progress toward our ambitious goal.
The 2017 Acting on the Call report details how a focus on health systems will enable the delivery of essential, quality health services and ensure that they reach the most vulnerable and underserved populations. Health systems consist of all people, institutions, resources and activities that impact the health of a population. For the first time ever, the 2017 report provides quantitative estimates of the value of investing in strengthening health systems.
By focusing on building strong and resilient health systems, we can save the lives of 5.6 million children and 260,000 women between 2016 and 2020.
This week’s Acting on the Call Summit, hosted by the Governments of Ethiopia and India and supported by USAID, UNICEF, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, NGOs, and private sector actors, celebrated our progress to date.
Over the past year, over 13,400 babies in Mali were saved by health providers who had received newborn resuscitation training through the USAID-supported Helping Babies Breathe partnership. In Pakistan, over 2.5 million women received maternal and child health and family planning information through USAID-trained community health workers, leading to 41,000 referrals to public sector health facilities.
These accomplishments encourage and drive us to continue our dedicated efforts, and the conference served as a platform to share best practices and identify next steps.
In 2016 alone, USAID helped 82 million women and children access essential health services.
These efforts have been accelerated by numerous successful public-private partnerships with American and international organizations that have been instrumental in leveraging additional resources to ensure more mothers and children have access to quality health care.
For example, Saving Mothers, Giving Life works to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality in sub-Saharan Africa and has seen impressive results, including a 55 percent reduction in maternal mortality and a 44 percent reduction in stillbirth and early newborn death in targeted facilities in Zambia. Survive and Thrive, building upon the original Helping Babies Breathe partnership, works to strengthen clinical competencies to support newborns. The partnership has trained 355,000 health workers in 80 countries to resuscitate newborns who were not breathing at birth.
I am motivated and humbled by the commitment I saw from ministers of health and high-level government representatives this week to ensure women and children have access to quality health services. I look forward to continued partnership as we look to build sustainable health systems and prevent child and maternal deaths.
About the Author
Barbara Hughes is the director of USAID’s Office of Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition.
