The project announced today will result in improvement to the quality and timeliness of maternal and newborn health services, and reduce illness and death for at least 10,000 pregnant women and newborns in Mozambique.  Canada’s funding toward this project will help increase the number of trained health workers, and improve access to quality care for mothers and newborns by creating three Centres of Excellence in Maternal, Newborn and Child Health.

The Centres of Excellence are expected to provide high-quality health services, teaching and training in three areas of Mozambique. The project will be implemented in three hospitals, which each serve a substantial population, and will include improvements to infrastructure, an increase of the quality of training provided, and enhanced referral and community linkages, in order to transform these three hospitals into “Centres of Excellence”. 

Saving Every Woman, Every Child: Within Arm’s Reach Summit

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. Summit participants will include Canadian and international experts on maternal, newborn and child health, representing civil society, business, academia, developed and developing countries, international organizations and global foundations.

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

Canada and the Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health

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.

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, and the Micronutrient Initiative.

src:news.gc.ca