Archive For The GMHC 2010
This week on the MHTF blog:
Some reading for the weekend:
Next week, we are gathering 60 people from around the world in a retreat-like setting just north of New York City for 2½ days. Our goal is to discuss and debate today’s tough questions in maternal health and to learn from the MHTF’s initiatives over the past 3 years. We’ll be focusing on big questions such as:
The result of our Buzz Meeting may be some solid strategies and action plans. Or the result may be better questions. Either will constitute success for us. As the meeting occurs, we’ll be posting on our blog and Twitter about some of topics of discussion so be sure to stay tuned next week!
Earlier this week, a Maternal Health Dialogue Series event focused on maternal morbidities and discussed why they are often neglected even within the maternal health field. A full summary and video of the event will be available soon through the Wilson Center website.
Fistula was one of the morbidities that was discussed at the event and was covered at the event by Karen Beattie of the Fistula Care Project. A photoessay from USAID, published this week, explores the work being done to address fistula in Guinea:
The average Guinean woman will have six children during her lifetime, but due to the lack of obstetric care, many develop fistula, a painful injury that is especially traumatic due to the stigma associated with it…USAID is helping more than 1,500 women in Guinea access treatment for fistula and working with communities-women and men, secular and religious leaders-to understand, prevent, and treat fistula while better supporting those who have suffered from it.
Written by: Ashoka
We are excited to announce the latest edition of Stories of Change, an electronic book series that tells the stories of changemakers from across Ashoka’s community. This fourth volume, called In Their Own Words: The Young Champions of Maternal Health, features voices from the next generation of ideas for maternal health describing their greatest successes and challenges during nine-month placements with Ashoka Fellow mentors.
Here are just a few examples of their inspirational stories:
“I was in front of the group [of pregnant adolescents] holding a closed shoe-box, explaining to the participants: ‘Think of the most important person in your lives. A person who deserves all your care, whom you truly love and know most intimately…’ As they sat thinking, I told them they would then meet this person face-to-face, inside this very shoebox! I had each girl come up to the front of the room and open the box, seeing a mirror inside. Shock registered on their faces as they realized that it was they themselves who deserve all care and love imaginable! They had worthy motivations and dreams that must be respected!”—Julianne P. Weis
“On the last day in Ghana, a few Young Champions and I visited Elmina Castle at the Cape coast of Ghana — a place where slaves used to be captured and kept before being shipped off to different parts of the world like America. Who knew how many emotions this place would expose for a young African woman who herself has lived during at apartheid?/ Being at Elmina was emotional yet I realized that during our time in the 21st century there are still forms of inequalities that happen in our midst. The death of women and children is a human rights issue.”—Hellen Kotlolo
“In a former life as a finance guy, I let my inner nerd trade in the bucket of Legos for an Excel model with complicated formulas and every costing function you can imagine holding it together. This month has required me to dust off lots of my old private sector skills. Funny thing is that applying these skills to extend healthcare to people in need is much more exciting than making anonymous shareholders richer.”—Seth Cochran
Read more to understand how this cross-cultural team of budding social entrepreneurs is transforming the field of maternal health:
Download the high-quality PDF, or read a lower-quality version below:
Can’t see the document? View it here
Stories of Change is Ashoka’s electronic book series. Through these publications, we share the stories of changemaking innovators in the Ashoka community: Fellows, Youth Venturers, staff, and partners. People who are producing system change solutions for social problems, inspiring innovation and creating an Everyone a Changemaker™ world. You can read our other volumes here.
The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative in coordination with the Maternal Health Task Force and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) invite you to a discussion of:
Silent Suffering: Maternal Morbidities in Developing Countries
Tuesday, September 27, 2011, 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
5th Floor Conference Room
Please RSVP to globalhealth@wilsoncenter.org with your name and affiliation.
featuring
Karen Beattie, Project Director, Fistula Care at EngenderHealth
Ann Blanc, Director, Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF)
Karen Hardee, President, Hardee Associates
Marge Koblinsky, Senior Technical Advisor, John Snow Inc.
For every mother that dies in childbirth another 20 women experience acute chronic morbidities or “near misses” that would otherwise result in death. The scope of maternal morbidities is diverse and the most prevalent types include anemia, fistula, infertility, uterine prolapse and maternal depression. Morbidities can cause serious pain, stigma, and suffering as well as negative social and economic consequences. Additional data is needed to measure the prevalence and effects of morbidities and safe motherhood programs should expand their focus to address these life-altering conditions.
Ann Blanc, Director, MHTF, will chair the dialogue session and discuss the prevalence of maternal morbidities in developing countries. Karen Hardee, President, Hardee Associates, will highlight programmatic approaches to address different types of morbidities and recommend key actions to improve maternal morbidity. Karen Beattie, Project Director, Fistula Care at EngenderHealth, will discuss the fistula morbidity and share lessons learned in prevention and treatment. Marge Koblinsky, Senior Technical Advisor, John Snow Inc., will present a case study of maternal morbidity in Bangladesh and the mental, social, and economic impact of morbidity on women and their families.
About the 2011 Maternal Health Dialogue Series
As one of the few forums dedicated to maternal health, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s 2011 Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health series brings together senior-level policymakers, academic researchers, media, and civil servants from the U.S. government and foreign consuls to identify challenges and discuss strategies for advancing the maternal health agenda.
In order to promote greater voices from the field, the 2011 dialogue is partnering with the African Population and Health Research Center in Kenya to co-host a two-part dialogue series with local, regional, and national decision-makers on effective maternal health policies and programs. These in-country dialogue meetings will create a platform for field workers, policymakers, program managers, media, and donors to share research, disseminate lessons learned, and address concerns related to policy, institutional, and organizational capacity building.
The Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative is pleased to present this series with its co-conveners, the Maternal Health Task Force and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and is grateful to USAID’s Bureau for Global Health for further technical assistance.
If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast at www.wilsoncenter.org. The webcast will begin approximately 10 minutes after the posted meeting time. You will need Windows Media Player to watch the webcast. To download the free player, visit: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download.
Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building: 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW (”Federal Triangle” stop on Blue/Orange Line), 5th floor conference room. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Photo identification is required to enter the building. Please allow additional time to pass through security.
This week on the MHTF blog:
Some reading for the weekend:
As we approach 2015, conversations about the quality of data for generating estimates of various indicators is gaining steam. According to a recent paper, very few countries are on track to meet MDGs 4 and 5 based on the estimate available. Unfortunately, the data used to generate those estimates is not as good as we would like. Additionally, countries with the highest levels of maternal and neonatal mortality are also generally those with the least reliable data.
In The Lancet this week, Peter Byass and Wendy Graham write:
Numerical assessments against the MDGs are inevitably processes that are plagued by poor and missing data, and their uneven distribution. The WHO-led Commission on Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health concluded “Countries most off-track for women’s and children’s health generally have the weakest civil registration systems”. In the absence of any reliable universal mechanism to “make each and every person count”, MDG mortality outcomes have defaulted to national-level metrics, which need detailed modelled interpretation. Although it is self-evident that the greatest numbers of avoidable deaths happen in some of the world’s largest countries, the highest individual risks can apply in smaller countries or within specific regions of larger countries—yet these important differentials are invisible. Global estimates must therefore be seen as a stop-gap approach to measuring progress.
The World Bank blogs provide an excellent resource to learn about the work the Bank is doing and other aspects of development. Whether it is Development Impact or Africa Can End Poverty there is a wealth of information from experts on a variety of topics. A new blog, launched this week, Investing in Health, focuses directly on health system strengthening, using maternal and child health as an example of why health systems matter:
So to start the conversation, please take just 2 minutes to watch this video (French/Spanish) [embedded below] and meet our brand new baby Maya. Maya shows us that it takes lots of things for a baby to be born healthy and thrive. It takes a health system, which includes investments in all of the different sectors that impact health (education, infrastructure, clean water, and roads, to name just a few).
Can’t see the video? View it on YouTube
Written by: Nick Sowden, Sales and Marketing Manager, Jacaranda Health
The following post originally appeared on Jacaranda’s blog. It is reposted here with permission.
At Jacaranda Health, we often say that we’re not great marketers, but our customers are. That may sound like false modesty, but it’s true that that many of our key marketing decisions are made by our target demographic: Eastern Nairobi’s mothers and expectant mothers. Customer feedback informs how we describe ourselves, the wording we use, the pictures we show off, our trademark colors and the design of printed materials. We even settled on our name and our slogan based on customer input.
Our process for gathering feedback is systematic, but we keep it fun and fairly informal. For each decision, we write down two options on two sheets of paper. (Whenever possible, we make sure to give participants something to read or touch.) We hand a woman one of the sheets, and get her thoughts. We hand her the other sheet, and get her thoughts. Then we ask for her preference between the two. The process takes about three minutes per woman, and the result is that we quickly find the most popular option, learn some new things about the community we want to serve, and build a following of customers who enjoy being a part of our work.
Asking a potential customer’s advice is a great way to pique their interest in your business – especially if you’re able to use their input. When designing our logo, members of Jacaranda’s team printed out our name on a bunch of sheets of paper, each in a different color. The mothers who participated in our focus group had strong opinions; they told us that pink didn’t work because it meant breast cancer. Brown and blue were okay, they said, but nothing special. When we showed them a particular shade of purple, they broke out in applause. Decision made – we’ve called it “Jacaranda purple” ever since.
In the same manner, women in our target communities have helped us decide what we should call our chain of clinics locally (Jacaranda Maternity), given input on our logo (the silhouetted pregnant woman should have a ponytail) and suggested how best to structure our pricing so that customers feel that they are getting good value for each visit. Local mothers have voted on literally every single word in our brochures: “Expectant mothers,” not “pregnant mothers;” “highly qualified staff,” not “experienced staff;” “promotion,” not “coupon.” They told us that above all else we should emphasize that we are very friendly. And when we were stuck on what to call our mobile clinic, they politely opined that just calling it a mobile clinic was probably fine.
With maternal mortality estimates published last year by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the United Nations, and the recent neonatal mortality estimates, it became relatively clear that most countries would not meet the ambitions set in Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5. A new report from IHME, published in The Lancet, confirms that few countries are on track:
An estimated 31 developing countries will achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4, which calls for a two-thirds reduction in the child mortality rate between 1990 and 2015, and 13 developing countries will achieve MDG 5, which calls for a three-fourths reduction in the maternal mortality ratio over the same period. Of those countries, nine will achieve both goals: China, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Maldives, Mongolia, Peru, Syria, and Tunisia.
Although many countries will not meet the lofty goals set in 2000, progress has been made in many countries, especially recently, that should allow us to still be optimistic about maternal and child health.
The report continues:
In 125 countries, maternal mortality has declined faster since 2000, the year that countries signed the Millennium Declaration, promising to make improvements in child and maternal health, and the progress has been particularly strong in the past five years. Over the same period, in 106 countries, child mortality rates have declined faster between 2000 and 2011 than in the previous decade.
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advocacy Ashoka Bangladesh Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation EngenderHealth family planning global health Global Maternal Health Conference 2010 HIV/AIDS India innovation Kenya Lancet Malawi maternal death maternal health Maternal Health Policy Series Maternal Health Task Force maternal morbidity maternal mortality MDG5 MDG 5 Mexico mhealth MHTF MHTF-supported project misoprostol neonatal health newborn health Nigeria nutrition obstetric fistula Population Council reproductive health research Save the Children The Lancet Uganda UNFPA USA USAID WHO Women Deliver Woodrow Wilson Center Young Champions of Maternal Health
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