G20
Wondering what the NGO community thought of the G8 and G20 Summits in Canada? Here’s a great round-up of responses from a host of our partners and friends from the online news source The Sherpa.
The G8:
http://www.sherpatimes.com/g8/179-g8-summit-ngo-responses.html
The G20:
http://www.sherpatimes.com/g8/185-ngo-responses-to-the-g20-summit.html
As ONE’s Kimberley Hunter reported from Toronto this weekend, on Friday, Canadian Prime Minister and G8 host Stephen Harper announced that the G8 would be contributing an additional $5 billion towards maternal, newborn and child health in developing countries over the next five years. Other donors – like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Norway, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Spain and Switzerland – pledged $2.3 billion, bringing the total up to $7.3 billion. While this is a welcome increase, it still falls far short of the $30 billion in additional funding that experts estimate is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals on maternal and child health by 2015.
More details on the so-called “Muskoka Initiative” were revealed with the release of the official G8 communiqué on Saturday, which included an annex outlining the initiative. Here at ONE, we were pleased to see that the initiative embraces some critical principles for long-term sustainability and effectiveness, like support for country-led national health plans and increased coherence through coordination and harmonization. Although there is a strong focus on outcomes (with an estimate from the World Health Organization and the World Bank that pledged funds will prevent the deaths of 1.3 million children and 64,000 mothers over the next five years), it stops short of setting out clear targets to meet these goals, such as supporting the training of an additional 3.5 million health care workers by 2015, a critical input to strengthening the health care that mothers and children need, especially during pregnancy, labor and the first five years of life, and an issue that 61,000 ONE members urged the G8 to support.
Moreover, in a year when G8 accountability was high on the summit agenda, the lack of clarity around individual country pledges is extremely disappointing. Although the communiqué states that the G8 will release the methodology used to define each country’s commitment and baselines, without this info it’s not clear which countries are truly delivering additional funding and which are using creative counting and hiding behind the G8’s collective commitment. It is critical that these details be made available, not only so advocates can chart the delivery of them, but also so governments and citizens in developing countries can start planning for them and make sure that the funds promised lead to lasting results for mother and children.
Every year, approximately 350,000 mothers die from complications during child birth and 8.8 million children die before their fifth birthday. We are desperately off track to achieving the Millennium Development Goals on child and maternal health and expectations were high for the G8 summit to deliver results.
Yesterday, the G8 announced the Muskoka Initiative on maternal, newborn, and child health. Although Canada deserves some credit for putting maternal and child health in the developing world on the G8 agenda this weekend, world leaders have not done enough to truly turn the tide on this vital issue.
At ONE, we campaigned for a robust maternal and child health initiative at this year’s G8 summit and for it to be accompanied by a concrete accountability framework. We also delivered a petition signed by more than 60,000 of you to world leaders to push them to deliver for the world’s more vulnerable – mothers and children.
While we were disappointed in the total G8 pledge of $5 billion to the Maternal and Child Health Initiative, our efforts elevated this issue, raised awareness, and will raise the bar for world leaders to address this and the other Millennium Development Goals at the UN Summit in September.
Sheila Nix, our U.S. Executive Director, was featured on CBC’s The National, the Canadian equivalent of NBC Nightly News, as part of segment on maternal and child health. Sheila talked about her trip to Ghana and Sierra Leone, and how simple interventions can prevent the mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDs giving children a whole new lease on life.
You can watch the clip here.
Cross-posted from the Gates Foundation website:
The G8 summit gets underway tomorrow in Muskoka, Canada. It’s exciting that a focus of the summit is a new G8 initiative – conceived and led by Canada – to improve maternal, newborn, and child health in poor countries.
G8 countries are expected to commit major resources toward the initiative. Other public and private donors are also lending support, including the Gates Foundation — we recently announced the foundation will make new grants totaling $1.5 billion over the next five years to support family planning, maternal and child health, and nutrition programs in developing countries.
The G8 commitments are an important landmark, but it’s more critical than ever to step up advocacy on global health. Right now there’s tremendous pressure in most donor countries to cut budgets, so we need to continue highlighting the fact that global health investments are working and are incredibly cost-effective. Maternal and child health is a great example – there’s very clear proof that low-cost solutions are saving lives, and can save many more if we expand effective programs.
This is a pivotal moment for women’s and children’s health. The task ahead is to be ready to make the most of the opportunity we created – to do the hard work of saving women’s and children’s lives. We must move forward together, as one, with the courage to overcome the obstacles that have stopped us in the past.
Our unity and our courage will be tested. Canada’s new initiative is the most ambitious effort on behalf of women’s and children’s health in history. And in a few weeks, the United Nations will publish its Joint Action Plan, leading up to the special session on the Millennium Development Goals in September. The whole world will be looking to us for leadership.
It will not be easy, but we must not fail. We are making a new world for poor women and children: a world in which every birth is a promise – a promise of a better future.
Check out groups like ONE and CARE for info about ways to make your voice heard.
ONE’s Mark Entwistle with our 58,000 signature strong petition
Yesterday, ONE’s Mark Entwistle delivered our petition with over 58,000 names calling for 3.5 million new health workers to help mothers and children to the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa, Canada.
Unfortunately, photographs aren’t allowed within the Langevin building itself, but we have it on good assurance that shortly after the above photo was taken Mark proceeded into the building to hand off the wishes of ONE members to the Canadian government.
This delivery presented some unique scheduling difficulties – on the eve of the G8, most senior members of the Canadian government are en route to Hunstville, Ontario, far away from the media centre for civil society organisations in Toronto where ONE will be based during the summit. So if we wanted to make sure the G8 heard our message before meeting, we needed to do it now, in Ottawa. But scheduling wasn’t easy given that the Prime Minister’s Office had quite a bit on their plates.
Luckily it all worked out for the best. In fact, it almost appeared that the fates conspired to make sure we could deliver our petition as a mere 20 minutes later, Ottawa was hit by an earthquake that caused all parliamentary and government offices to be evacuated!
During the summit ONE will be on the ground, fighting to make sure this G8 has the strongest outcome possible for people living in poverty. We’ll be keeping you updated through our blog and twitter – so watch this space!
The ONE team has arrived in Canada and is already hard at work raising awareness in the fight against extreme poverty with Toronto’s Mayor David Miller. We’re in town for the G8 and G20 Summits where maternal and child health and accountability are on the agenda. For several months, ONE has been actively engaging Canadian leadership to push for a robust maternal and child health initiative that includes accountability measures to make sure that country commitments are kept. We’re also calling for the G8 and G20 to forge a new partnership with Africa based on mutual accountability, good governance, trade and investment – a good start would be giving African countries more formal representation at the G20 to ensure that the poorest countries have a voice at global summits.
We’re currently in the Alternative Media Center which separates the NGO community and civil society from the media. Despite the logistical hurdles, we managed to meet Toronto’s Mayor David Miller, talk about ONE and our issues and give him a t-shirt to sport around town.
Today, leaders are arriving from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and, of course, Canada for the start of the G8 Summit tomorrow in Muskoka.
We’ll be checking in with updates and any news as it breaks – and we’ll be keeping the pressure on global leaders to agree to commitments that make a difference to the world’s poorest!
