Commitments analyzed
The Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health was created in 2010, along with the Every Woman Every Child movement, to accelerate action where progress is lagging.
The Global Strategy identified a funding gap of $88 billion between 2011-2015 to save the lives of 16 million women and children by 2015. The new and additional funding of $20 billion would go some way towards narrowing this gap. In total, PMNCH estimates that approximately $10 billion of the initial $58 billion has been spent.
Additionally, recent commitments to preterm birth, child survival, commodities, and family planning, such as the $2.6 billion pledged in July at the London Family Planning Summit, have not yet been tallied as part of the overall pledge total.
The Global Strategy push comes at a critical moment. An assessment of development aid targeted to women’s and children’s health from 2003-2010 published in a special issue of the Lancet medical journal (forthcoming Sept 28) shows that aid from donor governments and multilateral agencies more than doubled in this period, but that the rate of increase has been slowing since 2008, and declined slightly for the first time between 2009-2010, by $32 million, to $6.48 billion.
“The recent levelling off in aid to maternal, newborn and child health is likely due to the economic crisis,” says Justin Hsu, a health economist at the London School of Tropical Medicine and lead author of the Lancet paper and a member of the finance working group of Countdown to 2015. “What is worrisome is that if the levelling off continues, it will have an impact on the provision of child and maternal health services.”
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