May 14, 2015 – New York, U.S.A.
Check Against Delivery
Good afternoon.
I'd like to begin by thanking you, Mr. Secretary-General, on behalf of the Prime Minister of Canada, for your commitment and ongoing leadership to improve the health of women and children around the world.
It is an honour to be here in your company today to discuss an issue of vital importance to the future of our world.
An issue close to the hearts of Canada and Canadians.
Since 2010, improving maternal, newborn and child health has been Canada’s top international development priority.
And we are all here today because we believe that maternal, newborn and child health needs to remain a global priority beyond 2015.
In 2010, Canada helped to focus the world’s attention by leading the G-8 Muskoka Initiative on maternal, newborn and child health, which leveraged $7.3 billion from governments and global partners.
Canada’s efforts were then amplified when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health.
This leadership and the resulting wave of global action mean that, today, fewer women are dying in pregnancy and childbirth and millions more children are celebrating their fifth birthday.
That is tremendous progress.
And we have achieved it by working together.
But, there are still significant gaps.
To close them, we must stay the course.
This is why in May 2014, Canada once again mobilized the global community and reinvigorated the commitment to maternal, newborn and child health by hosting the Saving Every Woman, Every Child: Within Arm’s Reach summit in Toronto.
At the summit, Canada pledged $3.5 billion to build on the results we have already achieved in maternal, newborn and child health.
The summit brought together the world’s most eminent global leaders—UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, Queen Rania of Jordan, and Melinda Gates as well as the Canadian Network for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health.
The network brings together the knowledge, innovation and expertise of more than 80 Canadian organizations to contribute to our efforts to save the lives of the world’s women, newborns and children.
All of them agreed that maternal, newborn and child health must remain a global priority beyond 2015.
At the summit, participants agreed on several things, a few of which I’d like to highlight.
They agreed that our successes are due to the fact that global partners acted in unison to improve the health of women and children.
That both the Muskoka and Every Woman, Every Child initiatives were unprecedented in explicitly focusing global efforts on high-impact, evidence-based interventions during pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood.
And that we need to make greater efforts in areas such as newborn survival, nutrition and accountability.
Most hopefully, the brilliant minds, world experts and global leaders that the summit brought together agreed that, with renewed global commitment, we could end the preventable deaths of mothers and children within a generation.
We must rise to this challenge and seize this historic opportunity.
Canada is doing just that.
Today, I am pleased to announce that Canada is providing up to $18 million to Johns Hopkins University to develop a set of tools that will help us to better measure the results of our investments in maternal, newborn and child health.
The purpose-built tools will provide more frequent and relevant results data than what is currently available and will help to inform our investment decisions so that we can have the greatest impact.
Johns Hopkins University will develop the tools in collaboration with the Canadian Network for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health and in consultation with partner countries.
This initiative will also advance Canada’s efforts to improve global accountability for our results in maternal, newborn and child health—a signature element of Canada’s commitment.
It is clear that Canada continues to champion maternal, newborn and child health.
At the 69th session of the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Harper urged the General Assembly to keep maternal, newborn and child health at the top of the post-2015 development agenda.
Canada also joined representatives from the World Bank Group, Norway, and the United States to launch the Global Financing Facility in support of Every Woman, Every Child.
The Global Financing Facility uses an innovative approach to leverage resources from developing countries, the International Development Association managed by the World Bank, and the private sector.
Resources that are critical to filling the funding gap that limits our global efforts to deliver health services to the women and children who need them the most.
Looking ahead, I believe that we must keep working together to keep maternal, newborn and child health at the top of the development agenda.
An updated Global Strategy on Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ health will be key to making this happen.
That’s why I am pleased to announce that Canada is providing just over $1 million to the Executive Office of the United Nations Secretary-General to support its efforts to update the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health.
Canada sees the global strategy as a road map to guide our global efforts over the next fifteen years.
That’s why we continue to work closely with the Executive Office of the UN Secretary General and our global partners to renew the global strategy, and that’s also why, with Tanzania, we continue to lead on the strategy’s accountability work.
Canada also sees the Global Financing Facility as playing a key role in scaling up the financing we will need to support the updated global strategy.
That’s why we continue to call on our global partners to support the facility.
There is also what I like to call “an information gap.”
We need to seek out better ways to blend finance from individuals, donors, foundations and the private sector to address much-needed health, agriculture, infrastructure and small business investments.
As Chair of the OECD-World Economic Forum Redesigning Development Finance Initiative Steering Group, I am committed to working with global partners to identify, test, and scale up public-private blended finance models in a systematic way.
The additional investment generated by this approach will set the course for moving from billions of dollars to trillions, and significantly accelerate progress toward global development results.
This is why Canada has taken the lead in creating a Global Finance Exchange for Social Advancement in partnership with the World Economic Forum, Dalberg Global Development Advisors and a number of other players.
This exchange will serve as an online marketplace, a knowledge broker and an accelerator of innovative blended-finance models.
I like to compare this to a dating site.
It is a virtual space where we could harness the skills, expertise and resources of public, private and not-for-profit sectors.
In closing, I’d like to reiterate that despite the tremendous progress we have made, we have a lot more to do.
So, let us roll up our sleeves once again and keep working together to renew the global strategy and ensure that women’s and children’s health remains a top global priority beyond 2015.
Thank you.
