The Making Motherhood Safe project is aimed at improving access to quality health services for more than 500,000 vulnerable pregnant women and their newborns in the Dar es Salaam region in Tanzania, one of Canada's development countries of focus. Canada is allocating $10.2 million over four years to the project, which will be implemented by Comprehensive Community Based Rehabilitation in Tanzania (CCBRT).
The project focuses on:
- enhancing the skills of more than 600 health care providers in 22 public health facilities to provide quality maternal and newborn services in emergency situations; and
- recruiting and training close to 900 staff for a new specialized hospital in Dar es Salaam, the CCBRT Maternity and Newborn Hospital, at which it is estimated more than 15,000 babies will be born annually.
This project, to be implemented by FHI 360 as part of the Alive and Thrive Initiative, focuses on the nutrition, health and survival of newborns and infants in countries where undernutrition is widespread, by improving breastfeeding and infant feeding.
The goal of the project is to use state-of-the-art methods—such as private sector marketing, social networking, new technology, and technical assistance—to create the social and behavioural changes needed to improve infant and young child feeding practices. Activities include:
- engaging the private sector in the development of marketing strategies to improve breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices;
- promoting optimal breastfeeding practices during the neonatal period, and improved diets for women during adolescence, pregnancy, and lactation; and
- building the capacity of frontline health workers to address undernutrition effectively, and conduct awareness and behaviour change activities.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is hosting Saving Every Woman Every Child: Within Arm’s Reach, an international summit that will shape the future of child and maternal health collaborations in Canada and around the world, from May 28 to 30, 2014, in Toronto.
The Summit will build on Canada’s leadership and chart the way forward for the next phase of coordinated global efforts on maternal, newborn and child health. Participants at the Summit will include Canadian and international experts, representing civil society, business, academia, developed and developing countries, international organizations and global foundations on maternal, newborn and child health.
The Summit will focus on the following three themes:
- Delivering Results for Mothers and Children: Determining how, collectively, we have successfully delivered results and exploring how innovative technology and operating models are saving lives.
- Doing More Together Globally: Pushing new technologies and global partnerships to improve women’s and children’s health.
- Real Action for Women’s and Children’s Health: Identifying concrete steps that Canada and its partners will take to ensure that mortality rates drop, nutrition improves and more children live to see their fifth birthday.
The themes for the Summit were developed in consultation with key Canadian stakeholders
In June 2010, Canada led G-8 and non G-8 leaders to commit $7.3 billion, mobilizing global action to reduce maternal and infant mortality and improve the health of mothers and children in the world's poorest countries, through the Muskoka Initiative.
As part of the Muskoka Initiative, Canada committed to providing $1.1 billion in new funding between 2010 and 2015 to help women and children in the world’s poorest countries. Canada also announced it would maintain the ongoing spending of $1.75 billion in maternal, newborn and child health programming during the same period, resulting in a total commitment of $2.85 billion.
The Muskoka Initiative succeeded in sparking international attention. In September 2010, during the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Summit, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched Every Woman, Every Child, a global movement mobilizing the resources of governments, international organizations, the private sector and civil society in order to address the major health challenges facing women and children. The goal is to save 16 million lives by 2015.
In September 2013, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, together with Jakaya Kikwete, President of the Republic of Tanzania, co-hosted a UN event entitled Women’s and Children’s Health: The Unfinished Agenda of the Millennium Development Goals. The event, organized in support of the Every Woman Every Child initiative, examined ways to accelerate progress on improving maternal, newborn and child health and reducing the number of preventable deaths. President Kikwete will also be in attendance at the Summit in Toronto.
Canada is on track to meeting its Muskoka commitment, with 80 percent of the funding already disbursed. Under the Muskoka Initiative Partnership Program, Canada supported the efforts of 28 Canadian organizations to reduce maternal, newborn, and child mortality over three years in Haiti, Africa and Asia. Bilateral efforts are focused in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan and Tanzania, where maternal and child mortality rates are high; multilateral and global partners include the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the GAVI Alliance, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization.
