“The crisis of avoidable maternal, newborn, and child deaths in developing countries is currently a major focus for the global health community, and it will be one of the leading issues discussed at the September 2010 Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Many countries are off track to reach the 2015 child and maternal health MDGs (MDGs 4 and 5), and additional donor assistance will be needed to help countries get back on track.
How much donor assistance is currently available for maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) and how much additional financing will be needed? In this article, we examine the best estimates of current donor assistance to MNCH and of future funding that will be needed to reach MDGs 4 and 5.
We lay out several limitations in these estimates. We end with our recommendations for improving the tracking of MNCH financing flows and estimating the costs of scaling up MNCH interventions.”
Summary Points
- Reliable estimates of current spending on maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH)—and of how much additional funding is needed—are a critical precondition for sound policy and decision making.
- The Countdown to 2015 initiative estimates that, in 2006, donors spent US$3.48 billion on MNCH, of which 66% was spent on child health and 34% on maternal and newborn health, but these estimates suffer from several limitations.
- Updated estimates for 2007, released by Countdown in June 2010 but not yet available at the time of writing this article, have not addressed these limitations.
- The Consensus for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health argues that US$30 billion of additional funding is needed to save the lives of over 10 million women and children by 2015.
- This US$30 billion “price tag” is misleadingly low because it leaves out crucial service delivery costs.
- There is an urgent need to improve both the tracking of MNCH financing flows and the estimation of additional MNCH resources required to reach the child and maternal Millennium Development Goals.