The new head of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health faces a challenging global health environment as the Millennium Development Goals come to an end. John Maurice reports.
“Where I’m going there’s good energy and real excitement with so many different constituencies working to achieve the same goals”, says Robin Gorna, who takes up her new post on Feb 1 as executive director of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (PMNCH), hosted in WHO’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. On Jan 31, she will leave her post as executive director of AIDS Strategy, Advocacy and Policy, a consultancy she founded in 2010.
PMNCH was created in 2005 to speed attainment of two Millennium Development Goals (MDGs 4 and 5) that call, respectively, for a two-thirds reduction in child deaths and a three-fourths reduction in maternal deaths between 1990 and 2015. By the latest count, PMNCH has 650 members from seven different constituencies—government officials, research and teaching institutions, donors and foundations, health-care professionals, multilateral agencies, non-governmental organisations, and private industry.
“This is an exciting and challenging time to join such a partnership”, Gorna told The Lancet. “As we move into the era of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Partnership and the global health community as a whole face a number of questions. My overarching question is how a Geneva-based organisation like PMNCH can support countries in taking the right steps forward so as to make a difference to the lives of women, children, and adolescents. I wanted to join the Partnership because I believe it can have such an impact.”
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