Partners' Forum, 17-20 April 2007
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Constituency meetings
The six constituencies include:
- Academic/research institutions
- Health care professionals
- United Nations agencies
- Non governmental organizations
- Donors/foundations
- Governments
Some of the issues and challenges identified by the members of the Constituency groups:
- Clarification of the role of regional bodies with The Partnership;
- Open up greater advocacy opportunities to NGO's in the south;
- The need to build more alliances;
- The need to create a database for the sharing of information across and within constituency groups;
- Focus attention on how to strengthen health systems in general.
Some of the main themes repeated during the discussions included:
Continuum of care: The need to integrate health care services directed at mothers and their vulnerable children and babies, and to advocate for the delivery of quality health care services throughout the life-cycle. To ensure sustainability, maternal, newborn, and child health needs be better integrated into primary health care strategies.
Harmonization and coordination of efforts: The development of one message and clearly defined action plans to avoid the duplication of efforts in the field.
Increased funding for maternal, newborn and child health: Despite increased funding for health recently, maternal, newborn and child health is still grossly under-funded and a central objective of the Partnership must be to raise awareness of and political commitment to improving global maternal, newborn, and child health.
Creating greater demand for services: Strides in generating a paradigm shift at the community level from acceptance of high rates of maternal and newborn deaths as normal to intolerance need to be made.
Human resources training and management: The need to train and retain health care workers.