Focus UNFPA: Four Recommendations for Action

Last week, Working Group co-chairs Rachel Nugent, David Bloom (Harvard School of Public Health) and Jotham Musinguzi (Partners in Population and Development) released a new report from the Working Group on UNFPA’s Leadership Transition. The Group was formed last year to assess UNFPA’s effectiveness and role in the international system. The Working Group found that UNFPA conveys a mixed message about its purpose and accomplishments and urges the Fund to sharpen its focus, re-assert its role, communicate better both internally and externally and review its human resource capacity in order to better align staff expertise with country needs. With an estimated 215 million women lacking access to modern contraceptives and approximately 350,000 maternal deaths each year, UNFPA’s effectiveness can affect the lives of millions of women and children. You can read more about the launch on Rachel’s blog post and access background papers and country case studies that helped inform the Working Group process here.

The Determinants of Maternal Mortality Decline: A Cross Country Analysis

Nandini Oomman, with co-author Karen Grépin, Assistant Professor at New York University, presented a poster on their work exploring the determinants of maternal mortality decline at the Global Health Metrics & Evaluation conference in Seattle last month. The authors explored the health and non-health determinants of maternal mortality decline through a cross-country regression analysis. Preliminary results suggest that: (i) declines in maternal mortality were associated with increased use of antenatal care and skilled attendance at delivery but not contraceptive prevalence rate; (ii) the association between maternal mortality and the use of safe motherhood services remained, even after controlling for increases in DTP3 (used as a proxy measure for the strength of the health system); and (iii) changes in GDP per capita and democratic governance were associated with changes in maternal mortality. The audience offered useful suggestions for further analysis about the role of safe motherhood programs relative to other health and non-health factors.

Women and children in hospital. Mali. Photo: © Curt Carnemark / World Bank

Assessing Progress to Combat Drug Resistance

The theme of this year’s World Health Day (April 7) was antimicrobial resistance. Having recently issued a Working Group report on this topic in June 2010, Rachel Nugent revisited progress made on the four recommendations from the Working Group. WHO’s decision to focus World Health Day on drug resistance was a positive step towards the working group report’s overall goal of galvanizing action to combat drug resistance. However, progress on the specific recommendations has been slow—Rachel doles out grades ranging from B’s to F’s. You can read Rachel’s blog post and listen to her interviewed on a recent wonkcast for more on her reasoning for these low grades. In addition to the scorecard, Rachel also released an interactive map, which provides a snapshot of drug resistance data relating to selected infectious diseases across the world. We hope you will find the tool useful, and encourage our colleagues to fill in more data on resistance as it becomes available.