Cape Town - As the world prepares to celebrate and hail all mothers this Mother’s Day, an international conference at the Cape Town International Convention Centre highlights how far off the world is in seeing global sustainable development goals achieved in relation to maternal and newborn health.
The International Maternal Newborn Health Conference started on Monday and will run until tomorrow.
The first biennial Conference is hosted by the South African government through the Department of Health and AlignMNH, a global initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with the US Agency for International Development.
About 1800 attendees converged to accelerate solutions to improve maternal and newborn survival and prevent stillbirths in a co-ordinated and inclusive manner.
Yesterday, a media briefing was launched for the first joint progress report from the Ending Preventable Maternal Mortality initiative and Every Newborn Action Plan.
Malawi’s chief of Health Services and AlignMNH co-principal investigator, Dr Queen Dube, said 4.5 million women and newborns died annually worldwide. Progress had been made between 2010 and 2015, however from 2015 that progress had slowed down.
“If we continue at the rate we are going, we will unfortunately not be able to achieve our SGD targets for mothers and their babies,” she said. “That’s why these conferences come at such an opportune time, where we are gathering together, calling for accelerated action to end preventable maternal and newborn deaths.”
World Health Organization director of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Ageing and AlignMNH Steering Committee co-chairperson, Dr Anshu Banerjee, said progress had been made in increasing institutional delivery, but it had not been accompanied by a decline in maternal mortality.
“And that’s often because the quality of care that is provided is not of sufficient quality. And so this is another important area to invest in to make sure the interventions that are needed are all delivered and are of quality.”