On maternal survival: Where is Josephine Public?
advocacy, birth, campaign, maternal, mobilization, mortality, mothers, rights
While developing the campaign for mothers, we kept coming back to the question “Why is public awareness currently so low?”, and more specifically, “Why don’t women everywhere know about this issue?” There is clearly a vast and powerful global community ready to be mobilized on behalf of mothers – a worldwide constituency of women, mothers and grandmothers. Women in high-income countries have the potential to play a similar role to the part played by US AIDS activists who directly supported grassroots African advocacy and helped mobilize massive US funding for ARV treatment. There is general agreement that huge untapped reservoirs of public support exist for mothers – they just need to be mobilized. Yet for the last 20 years “Josephine Public” has been almost entirely missing from the maternal advocacy landscape. Why?
Maternal survival advocacy has so far taken place on the “inside” professional advocacy track, without the crucial “ballast” of public awareness and support. There has not yet been an effective public advocacy campaign that gives voice to mothers, delivering the facts and offering positive and effective solutions to the global public. As a result there exists virtually zero public awareness and engagement around the neglected tragedy of maternal deaths.
Funding for MDG 5 is the lowest of all of the MDGs, and maternal survival has not achieved the necessary political priority to generate adequate resources and commitment. Vibrant and uncompromising public mobilizations have powered other public health movements, and innovative design and fresh funding models via the web have brought a whole new generation of public engagement and resources to issues such as micro-financing, global poverty and malaria.
It is time to bring the stories of mothers to the public. We believe that a global, women-led public campaign is the missing piece of the maternal advocacy landscape.