In June the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, announced a $20 billion initiative to fund maternal and health survival programs. It sounds like a lot of money and then the sobering qualifier hit – it’s less than the U.S. bailout of any single large bank.
I’m both delighted to have a Secretary General who truly understands that need to address global women’s health and furious that we – the international community – were not already allocating this kind of funding specifically for women. Donor assistance to international family planning dropped from $723 million in 1995 to $442 million in 2004.
We really have our priorities out of whack when we allow 10 million women in a generation to die from preventable causes of pregnancy and childbirth. And what’s more, the solutions are not so complicated: modern contraception, skilled attendance at birth, access to emergency obstetric care. For example, one in 3 deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth could be avoided if women who want to plan their childbearing had access to contraceptives.
Of course, it gets more complicated. Emergency obstetric care is of little use if there is no road to it or if a husband will not take his wife to get help. But my point is, these challenges are not insurmountable and rather than fret about the complexity, we should dig in and start with what we know works.
About
Anika Rahman, a well-known international advocate for the rights of women, is the President of Americans for UNFPA where she is responsible for building American legislative and financial support for the promotion of women’s health and rights globally. For more than fifteen years, Ms. Rahman has monitored and analyzed United States and international policies that affect the health and rights of women.
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