UK House of Commons & WHO meeting of female parliamentarians
Date: 13 Mar 2007
Speaker: Secretary-General Don McKinnon
Location: London, UK
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen - Happy Commonwealth Day for yesterday; Happy Mother's Day for Sunday. And happy conferencing in the meantime, for today and tomorrow.
I'm delighted to be here, and honoured to be alongside Cherie Blair, Sally Keeble, Joy Phumaphi, Nigel Crisp, Monir Islam. More than that: I'm honoured to be amongst you all - experts and advocates alike.
This is the second year that the Commonwealth Secretariat has joined with Sally Keeble and with the World Health Organisation to mark Mothers Day.
Special thanks to Sally for bringing Parliamentarians from all over the world to celebrate the contribution of mothers not only to their families, but also to the political, economic and social development of their countries.
Anyone with half a heart knows that the death of a mother in pregnancy or childbirth is a tragedy not just for the woman who has lost her life, but for her entire family.
Why then do we find it so hard to turn our empathy into action, and stop what will surely one day be considered one of the greatest scandals of our times?
As you may know, I represent the 53 states of the Commonwealth: large and small, rich and poor, and home to 1.8 billion people, of every colour and creed.
And although the richer states have made impressive progress and reduced maternal deaths to very low levels, the Commonwealth still suffers 60% of all maternal deaths globally. Those deaths are heavily concentrated in a relatively few states in Africa and South Asia.
In many of those countries the maternal mortality rate has hardly changed in 30 years. In some - largely due to HIV/AIDS and health worker shortages - it has even risen.
Women in these countries are not dying from natural causes: they are dying from a combination of discrimination, poverty and political neglect.
Perhaps it's the true stories that really bring those statistics home to us.
My colleague, Ann Keeling here, was telling me recently how she first learnt the meaning of the acronym 'DOA', or 'dead on arrival'. In the 1980s the Japanese government built a state-of-the-art hospital in the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad.
But the awful reality was that hospital staff there weren't spending their time saving the lives of mothers and infants. Instead, they were removing the corpses of the large number of mothers being brought to the hospital 'dead on arrival'.
Some had travelled far; but most lived locally. Their lives would have been saved if the decision to take them to hospital had been made earlier. But in that social context only a male relative could decide that a mother in childbirth should be taken to hospital, and a male relative was needed to act as escort.
Women alone didn't have the power to make those decisions, even though it was female and not male relatives who were attending the mother in labour and witnessing her condition.
Those mothers died not from a lack of affordable care but from a lack of decision-making power within their own families and wider society.
Enough of problems: solutions are what matter. Maternal deaths can be easily and cheaply prevented - and I venture to suggest that this would indeed be happening if we were talking about paternal and not maternal deaths.
The solutions revolve around a combination of policy and practice.
It's the policy - or should I say the basic principle - of establishing and respecting women's sexual and reproductive rights.
And it's the practice of strengthening health systems: partly their drugs and equipment, but above all the quantity and the quality of the people who care for the sick.
Within this, our work at the Commonwealth Secretariat has focused on three things.
One: keeping maternal mortality, the 'Cinderella' Millennium Development Goal, on the Commonwealth and global agenda. We have worked with WHO and other partners on advocacy films and publications.
I'm particularly proud of last year's documentary film 'Fight for Life', which was aired far and wide on BBC World, and which called for universal access to health for women and children.
Two: supporting member states with technical assistance, research and information, particularly to ensure that maternal deaths are properly recorded and lessons learned.
Three: enabling Commonwealth countries to share best practice in reducing maternal mortality. Many of you will know that our Commonwealth Health Ministers meet every year in Geneva on the eve of the World Health Assembly.
I cannot understate the power of those meetings: the diversity of Commonwealth membership ensures that where there is a problem, another member state will have been there first and found a solution. When one Minister speaks, others listen.
But back to that hospital in Pakistan, and two more observations about it.
First, millions of women in the Commonwealth live days away from the affordable, quality medical care they need. And not surprising, maternal mortality tends to be highest in countries with the most severe shortages of trained health workers.
In the Commonwealth we are extremely concerned by the global shortage of trained health workers - the WHO estimates a global shortage of 4.3 million - and the impact that health worker migration is having upon health systems in some of the most vulnerable countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
It is a simple fact that there can be no health delivery without trained health workers.
That was the logic behind the 2004 Commonwealth Code of Conduct on the International Recruitment of Health Workers. Through our Code we aim to protect the most vulnerable countries from unmanaged migration and, in turn, to protect the health rights of citizens in those countries. It is an uphill struggle, but - like Sisyphus - we will keep pushing.
Second, as I said earlier, those mothers 'dead on arrival' in Pakistan died from social not medical causes.
Our work to promote gender equality and women's rights in the Commonwealth aims to address those social causes.
It aims to strengthen girls' education so they may marry later and have a greater say in their lives. It aims for at least 30% of female parliamentarians to ensure that women's reproductive rights and rights to services will not be forgotten. It aims to see governments the world over being able to prove that they spend as much of their budgets on women's health as men's - or women's education, or women's business opportunities.
It all comes under the Commonwealth Plan of Action for Gender Equality 2005-2015.
Finally, let me go out where I came in - with 'Yesterday'; with Commonwealth Day, and with its 2007 theme of 'Respecting Difference and Promoting Understanding'.
That theme reflects our determination to address the inequalities and the diminished life-chances of the most marginalised in society, the majority of whom are women. I am delighted to see so many Parliamentarians here today because it is you who have the power to be the voice of the millions of women who cannot make their voices heard.
Join the Commonwealth and join the WHO in being that voice. Half the people on this planet bear a lot more than half of its burdens. And they deserve our whole-hearted support. Thank you.
ENDS
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UK House of Commons & WHO meeting of female parliamentarians
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