o mother should give her own life to give life to another. Unfortunately, preventing maternal mortality remains a persistent global challenge.
The third United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) commits countries to reduce their maternal mortality rate to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030. At the current pace, the world is projected to fall far short of this target, resulting in more than 1 million additional, overwhelmingly preventable deaths.
Ending preventable maternal deaths is surprisingly difficult. For starters, many different causes can occur at all stages of pregnancy, making it difficult to determine a policy intervention’s success and its ability to effect lasting change. Second, annual maternal deaths number in the hundreds of thousands, not the millions. Given these circumstances, donors and policymakers prefer to invest in other public health imperatives, where they can have a larger impact and receive more accurate and timely information about outcomes.
But that should not diminish the significance of maternal mortality. The loss of a mother can devastate her family, starting with the other children she may already have.
She also likely cared for relatives or elders in her community, or played an important economic role as a farmer or trader. Her death could directly and negatively affect 10-20 people or more, spanning multiple generations. Research suggests that children with surviving mothers are more likely to live past the age of 10 and to stay in school longer.
Activists, practitioners and policymakers have made remarkable progress combating maternal mortality in countries like Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Tanzania.
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To help other countries replicate this performance, we recently cochaired Room 17, a working group linked to SDG 17 for revitalizing partnerships, as part of the 17 Rooms Initiative. We convened leading maternal health practitioners and experts at the forefront of redesigning global institutions to discuss an “impact hub” approach to the problem.