Strategic Advocacy and Maternal Mortality

This 12-page paper examines the place of women's health concerns in the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Professor Lynn Freedman explores "strategies to address maternal mortality and emphasises the importance of all women having access to EmOC (emergency obstetric care) in the event of birth complications". She explains that, "Using this MDG, we have an important opening for strategic advocacy focused on accountable health systems that can deliver the care necessary to save women's lives and improve their health."

What does this advocacy consist in? Or, as Freedman puts it, "What should the health, human rights, and development advocacy communities do to ensure the most appropriate and effective steps are taken - and how does this relate to other advocacy agendas?". In essence, the author argues that a new vision is needed - one that has the potential to reconnect households and communities to health care systems. She claims that this vision "should be premised on the recognition that, by its operation, a health system forms part of the very fabric of social and civic life".

The author proposes a communication strategy based on human rights and the recognition that health care professions should be held accountable - in a constructive rather than accusatory way - when things do not go well with regard to maternal mortality. What this involves is "developing an effective dynamic of obligation and entitlement between people and their government, and within the complex system of relationships that form the wider health system, both public and private". She also urges women's health advocates to partner with or link to those working in the fields of child health, HIV, and tuberculosis.

Click here to download this paper in PDF format.