Online Program

Oral

The Millennium Development Goals helped to guide global priorities and focus investments with the hope of making a major advances in world development. These goals were established at a UN Summit in 2000 with goals set for 2015. Major goals for human capital and human rights gave focus to nutrition and health of women and children and women´s empowerment. A UN conference in September 2010 reviewed progress on the MDG´s, resulting in a recommendation to initiate thinking on a post-2015 agenda. An intergovernmental process was initiated to identify Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for a Post-2015 Development Agenda, which has been in the making for the past several years. A major concern for the global health community is the incorporation into the SDGs of priorities in maternal, neonatal and child health. Among the 17 currently proposed SDGs to be met by 2030, only two address health and gender equality. While this is a positive step, at least two countries leading the process to develop the SDGs - Kenya and Hungary - have tried to remove reproductive health and rights from the health goal and water down the gender equality goal, leading to serious concern among MNCH advocates. This panel will first provide an overview of the current process for development of the post-2015 SDGs with involvement of the global MNCH community. Three papers will follow, focusing attention on some of the key priorities and issues in global MNCH that are still unresolved and need to be addressed in the post-2015 era, particularly centering on early life. One paper will discuss why it is critical to focus on integrated maternal, neonatal, and child health during the first 1000 days of life as the foundation for human capital development. Another paper will focus on key interventions in developing countries to address needs in early life in terms of what has worked and where new efforts need to be prioritized post-2015. A third paper will analyze global support for the critical issue of breastfeeding: how this has fared in the past and what is needed for the future.

Session Objectives: Identify the process by which the global health community is advocating for MNCH to be included in the Sustainable Development Goals of the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Discuss some of the key issues in MNCH for human capital development and human rights focusing on early life, and new or renewed priorities to address these concerns.