Setting “ambitious but achievable targets” to improve health and well-being, a new global strategy aims to serve as a road map to ending all preventable deaths among women, children and adolescents.
“It is so basic and so simple, to want a life where you are not discriminated against, where you have equal access to health services, education and employment opportunities,” said World Health Organization Director-general Margaret Chan, MD, MPH. “And yet it seems so difficult to achieve. I believe that the world only changes when we are inspired to make those changes. I believe that this generation of adolescents and young people will make those changes.”
The “Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health, 2016-2030” was released in September by U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon, MPA. The document outlines why such a strategy is needed and how it aligns with the more broad Sustainable Development Goals. Among the strategy’s “action areas” are country leadership, financing for health, community engagement and research and innovation.
APHA was involved with helping develop the strategy as a member of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health, said Laura Altobelli, DrPH, MPH, chair-elect of APHA’s International Health Section and the moderator at a session at APHA’s 143rd Annual Meeting and Exposition this fall in Chicago focusing on progress in women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health. Overall, more than 7,000 individuals and organizations contributed to the strategy.
“Really, this document was meant to feed into the Sustainable Development Goals and play a large advocacy role in the final play-out of how the Sustainable Development Goals were expressed, what the final balance was,” Altobelli told The Nation’s Health.
Altobelli said she sees the new strategy as a positive step. Prior to the recently released Sustainable Development Goals, the Millennium Development Goals released in 2000 set targets for 2015 such as cutting extreme poverty in half, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education.
One topic of discussion during the meeting session: that the two Millennium Development Goals of reducing child mortality and improving maternal health performed worst overall of all the goals. That points to a need for more work and funding in those areas, Altobelli said.
“Going forward, with all these additional goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, it’s a little worrisome that there will be even more of a competition for funds to go to maternal and child health,” Altobelli said. “With that stretching of funds, there’s really little or no evidence that’s explicit in the Sustainable Development Goals strategy that we need to look at the poorest of the poor. There’s no real equity orientation, to be sure the funds go where they’re needed.”
Oscar Cordon, MD, MPH, MA, an APHA International Health Section member who spoke about the strategy at the Annual Meeting session, has been involved in several meetings designed to refine the strategy’s goals. One key point, he told The Nation’s Health, is that “We all have a role to play.”
Also, Cordon said, success depends on creating conditions that allow “women, children and adolescents everywhere (to) realize their right to the highest attainable standards of health and well-being. This will deliver enormous social, demographic and economic benefits.”
A mother and baby smile in Ayacucho, Peru, in 2012. A global strategy is aimed at the health of women, children and teens.
Photo courtesy Pan American Health Organization
During a June meeting for stakeholders involved in Every Woman Every Child, the movement behind the new strategy, Cordon and others stressed the need for focusing on “harmonizing the humanitarian and development efforts to have a unified agenda to be financed.” The result is a section of the strategy that outlines approaches for humanitarian and fragile settings. More than half of all deaths among children younger than age 5 take place in areas of conflict, displacement or natural disasters, according to Every Woman Every Child.
The strategy sets three overarching priorities: survive, thrive and transform. In the document’s introduction, Ki-moon described it as “a grand vision. But it is achievable.”
The overall vision of the strategy is that by 2030, “every woman, child and adolescent in every setting realizes their rights to physical and mental health and well-being, has social and economic opportunities and is able to participate fully in shaping prosperous and sustainable societies.”
Specific goals include improvements in family planning and safe childbirth; better access to vaccines and treatments for HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and other diseases; as well as clean water, exclusive breastfeeding, nutrition and education.
The strategy devotes one section to challenges to overcome in improving women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health. Data on existing health challenges include that an estimated 289,000 died in 2013 in pregnancy and childbirth, with more than one life lost every two minutes.
Among the calls to action included in the strategy are those aimed at governments as well as donors and societies. The strategy calls on health workers and professional associations to take steps such as providing high quality care grounded in evidence, provide information to track progress and hold authorities accountable.
Improving maternal and child health continues to be an important international action item, said Altobelli, who founded a maternal and child health working group within APHA’s International Health Section. At the APHA Annual Meeting, the group held a joint business meeting with the MCH Section’s International Health Committee, and the two groups are planning future work.
In December, APHA co-hosted a Google+ Hangout with the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health that highlighted how the strategy can be applied to public health work in the United States and around the globe. Members can watch the archived broadcast now at bit.ly/strategyhangout.
The full global strategy is available at www.who.int and the Sustainable Development Goals are at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics. For the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health, visit www.who.int/pmnch.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
