The Millennium Development Goals
Maternity Worldwide are committed to meeting UN development goal 5 - reducing maternal mortality. Find out more about Millennium Development Goals and our strategies to meet them below.What are Millennium Developement Goals?
In September 2000, the largest-ever gathering of Heads of State ushered
in the new millennium by adopting the United Nations (UN) Millennium
Declaration. The Declaration, endorsed by 189 countries, translates
into eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to be reached by 2015.
These goals build on agreements made at UN conferences in the 1990s and
represent commitments to reduce poverty and hunger and tackle
ill-health, gender inequality, lack of education, lack of access to
clean water and environmental degradation.
The MDGs assume an international, sector-wide approach, recognising the
contribution that developed countries can make through trade,
development assistance, debt relief, access to essential medicines and
technology transfer.
Three out of eight goals, eight of the 16 targets and 18 of the 48
indicators relate directly to health. Health is also an important
contributor to several other goals. The significance of the MDGs lies
in the linkages between them: they are a mutually reinforcing framework
to improve overall human development.
Millennium Development Goal 5: Reducing Maternal Mortality
The British Medical Journal declared that a steep decline in maternal and child mortality is required to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
The good news is that Millennium Development Goal 5 which calls for a three-quarter reduction in the rate of maternal mortality by 2015 can be achieved by scaling up the coverage rates of a handful of key maternal mortality interventions.
These include:
- improving access to comprehensive essential obstetric care by lowering the financial barrier for health services users.
- promoting better knowledge on and attitudes towards maternal health issues; responding at the first - not last - opportunity.
- making information available on where health service providers are located and on the availability of roads and transport to reach them.
- increasing the accountability of health service providers to users and policy-makers.
- meeting the human resource challenge within the health services through increasing training opportunities.
- improving access to affordable medicines and essential supplies.
Maternity Worldwide programmatic activities are delivering on all of these key maternal mortality interventions. Despite significant success in East Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa in reducing the maternal mortality rate, 0% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa are living in countries on track to reach the fifth Millennium Development Goal .
It is clear that the need is great. However, it is also clear that progress towards reducing maternal mortality will provide a significant boost to the success of the global poverty reduction agenda.
