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?


