Global maternal mortality has dropped by one third since 1990, but still every day an estimated 1,000 women lose their life in childbirth.  For the past year, USAID, the UK Department for International Development, Australian Agency for International Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have worked in partnership to accelerate progress in improving maternal and child health.  Launched at last year’s UN General Assembly Summit on the Millennium Development Goals, the Alliance for Reproductive, Maternal, and Newborn Health has supported the UN Secretary-General’s Every Woman, Every Child effort.

As director of USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health, I’ve seen firsthand how this unique partnership has enhanced our efforts to improve the lives of women and children in the countries we work.  Through shared planning and funding, coordinated implementation, joint problem-solving, and joint learning, we’ve seen results that have far exceeded what any one organization could have achieved on its own.  For example, in Ethiopia, more women will have access to contraceptive implants and the government will save an estimated $2 million per year because Alliance partners worked with manufacturers to reduce the price of reproductive health commodities.

And in Pakistan, Alliance members helped increase the number of trained community midwives from 2,795 in 2010 to 7,764 in 2011, promising to reduce maternal and newborn death rates.  These are just examples from two of the ten countries in which the Alliance is focused on in its first year.

What makes the Alliance partnership different is that it brings added value, not added work, through smarter application of resources.  Through our joint efforts, by 2015, the Alliance aims to contribute to:

  • 100 million additional users of modern methods of family planning to reduce unmet need.
  • 67 million more women giving birth with the help of skilled attendants to reduce the maternal mortality ratio.
  • 80 million more infants exclusively breastfed through the first six months of life to reduce newborn mortality.

You can learn more about the Alliance’s work over the past year and our achievements in a one year progress report (pdf, 2.3mb) submitted this week to the UN Secretary-General’s Every Woman, Every Child effort.  In the coming year, the Alliance intends to expand to include additional partners and countries.