The Huffington Post has joined with the Mother’s Day Every Day Campaign (led by the White Ribbon Alliance and CARE) in the global movement to call upon world leaders to invest in health workers and strengthen health systems. These are necessary to ensure that every day, everywhere in the world, all women and newborns have access to lifesaving care. Every day until Mother’s Day will feature a post from the campaign advisory committee members and global champions such as Donna Shalala, Ann Venemen, UK First Lady Sarah Brown, Liya Kebede, Theresa Shaver and Helene Gayle.

Check out the first post “Leading the Way to Make Mothers Day Every Day” by Secretary Donna Shalala and UNICEF Director Ann Veneman.

Excerpts below, full piece here

On this Mother’s Day, we celebrate the women around the world who gave us life. We appreciate the untold sacrifices they made so we could be healthy and happy. We recognize all that they have done outside our families to build better, safer and more prosperous communities, nations and world.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the resource-poor developing countries where women play a critical role in breaking the cycle of poverty.

Unfortunately, many women and their families in these parts of the world don’t have much to celebrate this Mother’s Day. The loss of life from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth continues at alarming rates.

Every minute a woman from these regions dies in pregnancy or childbirth. Last year, that totaled more than 536,000 women, leaving behind families devastated by a loss that in most cases could have been prevented. But the tragedy doesn’t stop there. Last year, more than 3.7 million newborns died, 75 percent within seven days of birth. They, too, would almost always survive, if there was access to basic health care services that we often take for granted here in the United States.

-Margaret McDonnell, US NGO Partnerships & Faith Relations Team