While progress in maternal and child survival has been made, this has not been enough to achieve Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5. According to a recent report, maternal mortality has declined dramatically, with maternal deaths dropping from 543,000 to 287,000 (between 1990 to 2010), however only nine countries are on track to achieve Millennium Development Goal 5 with 25 countries making insufficient or no progress. The situation is worrying specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa, where an African woman’s lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes is 100 times higher than that of a woman in a developed country.
A similar situation is evident in child mortality where progress has been made (deaths declined from 12 million to 7.6 million (1990 to 2010)) however only 23 countries are on track to achieve Millennium Development Goal 4 with 13 making little or no progress. Moreover despite recent improvements, pneumonia and diarrhoea still cause more than two million deaths a year that could be avoided by available preventive measures and prompt treatment.
mHealth is starting to deliver on its promise of health system support but can these isolated examples of impact at scale be fast-tracked to deliver on the MDG goals up to 2015?
Using existing success stories, the GSMA mHealth team is holding a webinar on 13th of November at 12pm GMT to explore four key drivers of successful and impactful mHealth services:
- Reducing fragmentation
- Delivering scalability
- Replication across other disease portfolios and countries
- Alignment of the value proposition for health and mobile
Presenters include:
- Mojca Cargo, mHealth Programme Coordinator, GSMA Mobile for Development
- Judy Njogu, Product Manager for eHealth & eLearning, Safaricom
- Joanne Stevens, consultant to Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) South Africa, MAMA South Africa
- George Held, VP of Commerce, Etisalat
- Alice Fabiano, Senior Program Officer and Advisor, Johnson & Johnson
Register to attend this webinar
Images: UNDP Brazil