It was a privilege to join the WTA Foundation and the  Gates Foundation, at their kind invitation, for a high-level private discussion on improving maternal health and nutrition in the world’s most vulnerable communities, held ahead of an afternoon at Wimbledon yesterday, in support of the WTA Foundation’s Women Change the Game campaign for their Global Women’s Health Fund and UNICEF’s Child Nutrition Fund, and its work to scale up maternal and child nutrition delivery worldwide.

Nearly four in five Nigerian women are affected by anaemia, and nine in ten women across low and middle income countries still lack access to prenatal vitamins, a gap that continues to cost mothers and children their lives and their futures, and one that is not an abstraction to me but a description of the women Wellbeing Foundation Africa serves every day, through our WBFA midwife led antenatal and postnatal care under our MamaCare360 platform, where nutrition counselling, breastfeeding support and respectful maternity care are delivered alongside one another as a single continuum of care.

Conversations of this kind, uniting philanthropic capital, corporate partnership and civil society delivery, are how the promise made to mothers and children is finally kept.

I urged CNF donors to consider integrating private sector institutional health providers’ access within the Fund’s wider scaling implementation, extending coverage into its reach and turning these important commitments into universal nutrition care.

My thanks to the WTA Foundation, the Gates Foundation and UNICEF for the invitation, and for a shared commitment to closing this gap together.

 

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