Goals for women and children 'will not be met'
Martin Drewry, Director, Health Poverty Action, comments:
“The truth is even worse than this report reveals. The Millennium Development Goals only tell half the story; because they measure national averages they obscure vast inequalities within countries. There are many countries which appear to be moving towards achieving the goals, but which have such internal disparity in wealth that in some areas women and children die as frequently as in the poorest nations in the world. Because of arbitrary national boundaries, funding to these areas is cut and people die needlessly.
“We will never achieve the MDGs, let alone by 2015, if world leaders portray aid as the primary answer to better global health. There are many developing countries which spend more on national debt, or lose more from tax avoidance than they spend on their health services. This is the scandal the UN should be addressing.”
Information on the UN report 'Every Woman, Every Child: from commitments to action'
Published 26 September 2012
Most of world will fail to meet goals for women’s and children’s health by 2015 amid declining donor funding, report warns
The first report of the UN Secretary-General's independent Expert Review Group (iERG) on Information and Accountability for Women's and Children's Health, will be launched at the UN General Assembly. Titled 'Every Woman, Every Child: from commitments to action', it will conclude that although headline reductions in maternal and child mortality during the past decade have been impressive in some countries, millions of women and children still die every year from preventable causes. Unless those causes are more urgently addressed globally and in countries, Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5 will not be met by most nations by the target year of 2015, the report warns. What is more, declining rates of donor funding and a failure to target resources to the countries with the greatest need could have devastating consequences for the survival of millions of women and children worldwide, claims the paper. There will be a press event to launch this report at 12:00 EST at North Lawn Building, Conference Room 6, United Nations, New York. Speakers will include: Margaret Chan, Director General, WHO - Vice-Chair of the Accountability Commission; Hamadoun I. Touré, Secretary-General, ITU -Vice-Chair of the Accountability Commission; Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet - iERG Co-Chair; Joy Phumaphi, Executive Secretary of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA) - iERG Co-Chair.
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