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Celebrate Women’s Day: Get Your Free E-Book
We are giving away our e-book, Simple Steps to Become a Maternal Health Advocate, for free to members of our community only.
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Announcing #MaternalHealthChat Starting November 8 With Jacaranda Health
We are very pleased and excited to announce our new weekly chats all about maternal health with some of the leading maternal health experts, researchers, practitioners, and organizations in the world under the #maternalhealthchat hashtag. Starting on Tuesday, November 8 at 1 PM EST with Jacaranda Health we will host 30-minute chats each week all about maternal and reproductive health…
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NYC Report Tackles Maternal Morbidity Rates
For years researchers who study maternal morbidity and mortality have been stumped as to why rates continue to rise and why women of color are adversely affected despite education, health care, and socio-economic factors. A new report and the first of its kind released in May, New York City 2008 – 2012: Severe Maternal Morbidity, shows…
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Botswana Receives First White Space Telemedicine Service to Reach Rural Populations
One of the beautiful aspects of Africa is its beautiful, wide expanses. All over the continent you will be awed by how far-reaching your eyes can see especially when traveling through its spectacular countryside. But as much as it is beautiful, the size of Africa also poses a significant problem because without modern infrastructure, including the Internet, and transport…
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Bill and Melinda Gates’ 15-Year Bet For a Better World
Each January Bill and Melinda Gates release their Annual Letter. This year they are taking a bet on the world’s future. 15 years ago the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was started and there have been substantial improvements in global health and development since then because of its dedication to the world’s poorest people. Now,…
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5 Global Health Stories We’re Following This Year
2015 will be an interesting year in global health primarily because this is the year when the Millennium Development Goals should ideally be reached. Global health experts admit that many of the goals, for example MDG5, will not be reached globally even though some of them have already been reached on a country level. Ethiopia effectively reached MDG4…
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7 Facts About Premature Births You Might Not Have Known
Photo: A premature baby is shown in the postnatal ward at Cama Hospital, a major hospital for women and children, in Mumbai, India. UN Photo/Mark Garten Premature births are now the number one killer of babies globally. Of the 6.3 million children under five who died last year, 1.1 million of them died due to complications from premature…
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Why Secondary Education for Girls Reduces Child Marriage, Early Pregnancies
UNESCO just released its report, Sustainable Development: Post 2015 Begins With Education, that takes a look at the critical importance of education on the post-2015 agenda. The core stance in the report portends that without greater access to education poverty eradication will become increasingly difficult to achieve by 2030. The betterment of women’s and girls’ lives…
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Photos from the Field: Expectant Mother Seeks Help in “Lie and Wait” House #Ethiopia
Expectant woman, Ayelech Fikadu, and her mother, Zarge Badunga sit in a “lie and wait” house at Project Mercy outside of Butajira, Ethiopia. The house was recently renovated by USAID and Pathfinder. Butajira is located in Ethiopia’s southern highlands where many live in the mountains. Women who live in the mountains have a difficult time…
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How Ethiopia is Scaling Midwifery to Save More Mothers, Newborns
Addis Ababa- In Ethiopia there are 4.9 million pregnancies each year of which 84% take place in rural areas. Here in Ethiopia, where the vast majority of women deliver at home, only 32% of maternal, newborn and child health needs are being met by midwives according to the newly released State of Midwifery Report. That is troubling…
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Save the Children Releases New Report on Motherhood in Conflict
This article was originally published on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Impatient Optimists. Every year Save the Children releases its annual State of the World’s Mothers report and each year a magnifying glass is held up to motherhood around the world and how mothers fare based solely on where they live. Now in its fifteenth year, Save the…
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Last Minute Mother’s Day Gifts That Give Back and Save Lives
Mother’s Day is a celebration full of flowers, cards, and sentimental mementos. It’s also a day to celebrate not only our mothers and the moms we know personally, but mothers everywhere. As you know there are women around the world who will lose their life giving birth. That may sound blunt, but the numbers say it…
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Sharing the Gift of Health – this Mother’s Day and Every Day
By Casey Santiago, Founder and CEO of Kangu.org As every mom can attest, motherhood changes you. For me, becoming a mother made me feel, for the first time, part of a global sisterhood. Though we may live very different lives, all the world’s moms share one of life’s most beautiful experiences – becoming and being…
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Have You Heard How Rice University is Saving Newborns?
Throughout the entire Mother’s Day month we will dedicate several posts to newborn and maternal health. We will feature programs and projects that are showing considerable progress in newborn health, are efficient and cost-cutting, and are even shaking up the newborn health and survival landscape with innovations in low-and middle-income countries. Even though it’s not May…
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A Plan to Save More Newborns in 2014 and Beyond
In 2014 newborns the world over will receive the much-needed attention they need to live and survive. Drawing on all of the great work from last year starting with the Global Newborn Health Conference held in Johannesburg last April leading up until now with the draft of the Every Newborn Action Plan newborns and their survival…
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Why We Need World Prematurity Day
One of the world’s greatest tragedies is when babies are born too soon. Every day a mother around the world experiences the heartache of delivering her baby before 37 weeks gestation whether she is walking on foot to a rural health facility in Bangladesh, delivering her baby in a hut in the lush countryside of…
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New Report Highlights Motherhood in Childhood
When I traveled throughout Tanzania and Zambia recently I noticed young mothers at every turn. With sleeping babies closely wrapped on their backs I often thought how fortunate these girls were to have survived a pregnancy and delivery at such a young age and then my thoughts would wander off thinking how many children might…
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![[Photos] Motherhood in Tanzania #IRPTZ](https://socialgoodmoms.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/dsc5605.jpg)
[Photos] Motherhood in Tanzania #IRPTZ
Dar es Saalam, Tanzania – Throughout my travels in Tanzania for the past ten days every time I saw a mother and her baby I smiled inside. And I was even more happy to see mothers breastfeeding their babies as breastfeeding has been proven to be a key intervention to keep more children under the…
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UNICEF Features Fantastic Breastfeeding Images
During World Breastfeeding Week UNICEF shared knowledgeable breastfeeding infographics along with beautiful photos of breastfeeding mothers on Facebook. Whenever I travel to low or middle income countries I always see scores of breastfeeding mothers and their children, but those numbers could be greater in order to save more babies. Simply breastfeeding gives babies an increased…
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4 Ways You Can Help Save Newborn Lives
Last week the Global Newborn Health Conference took place in Johannesburg, South Africa. As the first conference to gather leading experts and NGOs together working to reduce newborn mortality, one solid, unified voice emerged committed to saving more newborn lives not in lip service, but rather in actionable ideas and steps to reach Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4…