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The Save-the-World Clock - Part 5
 Elizabeth Dickinson - Foreign Policy
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September 23, 2010
| | (Jose Cendon/AFP/Getty Images) | |
GOAL: IMPROVE MATERNAL HEALTH
Targets: Hundreds of thousands of mothers die each year while giving birth; the aim here is to reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters through the provision of a trained birth assistant and access to emergency medical care. Countries are also urged to provide women with universal access to reproductive health, including family planning and neonatal services.
Reality: Little progress has been made, and the world is now trying hard to catch up. Some 358,000 women died from treatable causes while giving birth in 2008, down from 546,000 in 1990, according to a World Health Organization report released this week. Still, the rate of progress is "less than half of what is needed" to reach the goal's target, the report says.
The world has known just how important women are when it comes to development for a while now. Beginning in the mid-1990s, social scientists began to notice that women had a key impact on reducing poverty in households by spending income on such things as education and the health of their children. The implication was that improving the status of women would also have knock-on effects on other facets of development.
Yet now is really the first time that there has been such a political push to move that research into practice. The U.N. secretary-general's August 6 strategy on women and children's health notes the residual effects on poverty, economic productivity, and growth. The hope is that working to improve the lives of women will boost, rather than take away from other goals.
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