Every Mother Counts Executive Director Travels to Uganda and Zambia with Saving Mothers, Giving Life Partners

Supporters of Every Mother Counts know that we have one main goal—to engage and enlist more individuals in a movement to improve maternal health and reduce maternal mortality globally. Therefore, we were excited to learn that the U.S. State Department's Global Health Initiative (GHI) wanted to partner with us.

Since early last fall, we have engaged in dozens of discussions with four other founding partners in an initiative called Saving Mothers, Giving Life (Saving Mothers) which includes the GHI, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Merck for Mothers, and the Government of Norway to find a way to join forces and address global maternal health challenges which claim too many lives during childbirth. Saving Mothers is a new public/private partnership, which is committed to significantly reduce maternal mortality in Uganda and Zambia. We’re starting small at first, focusing on four districts in each country, but hope that we can take what we learn to develop cost-effective and scalable approaches that can be extended more broadly. We believe that together, partnered with GHI, we can make an even greater impact building on a pre-existing infrastructure that was laid to fight HIV/AIDS through PEPFAR, (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) in these and other sub-Saharan, African countries.

Earlier this spring, some of the partners managed to carve out a week to travel to Uganda and Zambia together, and get a better sense offor how we could achieve the ambitious goals we have set for ourselves. We started in Uganda. Though we were based in the capital of Kampala, Saving Mothers will concentrate its efforts in four contiguous districts in western Uganda. We drove to Kibaale one day where we met with several of the key implementing partners working in the area. The focus of our visits and conversations in Uganda were based on the supply side of the issues. Women are used to showing up at clinics after a multi-mile trek and finding the nurse to be out, or that there are no supplies, etc. The pregnant woman is then stranded miles from home, without her support network for help. The Ugandan team is hard at work to improve these barriers to aid in these districts, so that every woman is confident that if she can get there, there will be help for her.

We then travelled to Zambia where many of the challenges seemed similar, but we spent a large portion of time specifically talking about transportation and communication systems. I was especially struck by some of the distances women must travel and also by the fact that many facilities don’t even have a phone to call for help or for a referral if needed. Sure, women may borrow a nurse’s personal phone, but it is not always likely that the nurse possesses one.

Back in 2003 when the U.S. launched its major initiative on HIV/AIDS, PEPFAR, I was working for ONE and was lucky enough to travel to many of these same countries where the infrastructure was being built to address this complicated, infectious disease. There was such tremendous energy from partners in the field at the time, and I felt an inkling of that energy once again. The feeling was helped along by the fact that many of the folks we were meeting with this past March were some of the same heroes in the fight against AIDS whom I’d come to know and admire so many years ago. They are now taking all that expertise and capability and leveraging it to address maternal health. It’s exciting on so many levels—I can only hope we are at the beginning of something as successful as those HIV/AIDS efforts have been.

The role that Every Mother Counts will play is to do what we do best, to help raise awareness amongst a broader constituency about maternal health challenges and solutions in these countries. We have also committed to driving a portion of the resources we mobilize to effective partners on the ground in these key districts who are working toward achieving the shared goals of Saving Mothers. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton officially announced the effort in Oslo, Norway on June 1 and mentioned it again today at the Child Survival Call to Action Conference. You can read more about the initiative on the Saving Mothers, Giving Life and Every Mother Counts will keep you up to speed on our site as the programs develop in the coming months and years.