7 Facts You Should Know About Maternal Health (infographic)

Improving maternal health is simple. It is only a matter of making the decision as a society that women’s lives are worth (saving). But achieving this vision involves facing challenges on many fronts and at a large scale: from changing beliefs and practices deeply entrenched in many societies, to raising education levels or putting into place pro-poor policies. Where this is not happening, as Save the Children’s new annual report puts it, for millions of mothers and their babies in developing countries, it is a dance with death. The maternal mortality ratio in developing regions is still 15 times higher than in the developed regions. So in the end it turns out to be a rather complex issue.

Woman Deliver 2013 conference starts, a global forum where advocates gather to generate political commitment and resource investments to reduce maternal mortality and achieve universal access to reproductive health. It seems a good occasion to highlight some of the main factors that in the XXI century still conspire against accelerating progress towards achieving Millenium Development Goal 5, aka improving maternal health.

Dowload the presentation here.