Every Woman Every Child

High-Level Steering Group for
Every Woman Every Child

The UN Secretary-General established a High-level Advisory Group for Every Woman Every Child to help provide leadership and inspire ambitious action for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health, as well as encourage collaboration with relevant areas of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,

The group is co-chaired by H.E. Ms. Kersti Kaljulai, President of the Estoni,a and there are two alternate co-chairs: H.E. Ms. Tarja Halonen, former President of the Republic of Finland, and H.E. Mr. Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, former President of the United Republic of Tanzania.

The members include global representation from governments, the business community, philanthropists, young people, civil society and multilateral systems. They reflect the diversity of the Every Woman Every Child movement.

The initial members announced in January 2016 have been expanded to include additional key leaders. With initial appointments lasting for one year, the group meets to review progress and challenges and provide recommendations on issues such as financing, accountability, cross-sectoral action and country-level implementation of the Every Woman Every Child Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health.

Click here to download the EWEC HLSG’s bios.

H6 Partnership

Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCAH) is central to Agenda 2030. This provides the opportunity to reaffirm the crucial role of the UN agencies in supporting countries to improve the health and well-being of women, children and adolescents by addressing universal coverage with quality RMNCAH services, including adolescent sexual and reproductive health services.

The H6 partnership (formerly known as H4+) consists of six member organizations: UNAIDS, UNFPA, UNICEF, UN Women, WHO and the World Bank Group. This partnership works to tackle the root causes of maternal, newborn, child and adolescent mortality and morbidity, including gender inequalities and sociocultural and financial barriers.

The members of the H6 provide technical support to high-burden countries in their efforts to implement the UN Secretary-General’s Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health 2016-2030 and reach the targets of the health-related Sustainable Development Goals.

The H6 is presently chaired by WHO.

The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (The Partnership, PMNCH)

The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (PMNCH) is the world’s largest alliance for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health. It brings together over 1,000 partner organizations from 10 constituencies across 192 countries.

PMNCH provides a platform for diverse organizations from donor agencies, national governments, the UN, academia, NGOs, the private sector, youth organizations and other groups. These groups work to align objectives, strategies and resources, and to agree on evidence for action to support the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals, including through Universal Health Coverage and Primary Health Care.

Global Financing Facility

Healthy women and children enable healthy economies, political stability and forward momentum. However, far too many newborns, children, adolescents and women still die of preventable conditions every year, and too few have access to quality health services.

The Global Financing Facility (GFF), in support of Every Woman Every Child, was announced in September 2014 to respond to this challenge and help close the funding gap for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health.

Learn more.

Every Woman Every Child Innovation Marketplace

Challenge

Despite progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), each year approximately 5.3 million children die before the age of five and 295,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth. In the early years of life, 1 in 3 children fail to reach their full potential. Although there is an increasing number of innovations addressing health barriers at the early pilot stage, a bottleneck exists at  the early stages of growth when innovators seek between $250,000 and $15,000,000 in capital to further prove their innovations and/or gain traction beyond early adopters.

To tackle this bottleneck, within the Every Woman Every Child (EWEC) movement, the EWEC Innovation Marketplace was developed as an alliance of development innovation organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, the United States Agency for International Development and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.

What is the EWEC Innovation Marketplace?

The EWEC Innovation Marketplace is an innovation support platform that manages a rolling health innovation portfolio that is selected due to their high potential to save and improve the lives of women and children in low- and middle-income countries and their likelihood to scale sustainably for long-term impact. It works closely with each portfolio organization to provide support and create opportunities for partnerships with funders, investors, multilaterals, local implementation and commercialization partners to unlock their success. 

The Process

Success to Date

The EWEC Innovation Marketplace currently supports 52 portfolio companies operating in over 29 countries.  The Innovation Marketplace’s proven approach has helped empower its portfolio to successfully raise $32 million in growth capital and grants for projects aimed at advancing their impact goals.

The Marketplace platform itself offers an exceptional leverage ratio for impact capital catalyzed by its anchor partners, recently achieving a 10x ratio of operating cost to capital catalyzed for Innovation Marketplace portfolio companies.

See below for examples of Innovation Marketplace portfolio companies:

To discuss the Innovation Marketplace, please contact the Innovation Marketplace Secretariat at innovationmarketplace@grandchallenges.ca.

Independent Accountability Panel (IAP)

In September 2015, the UN Secretary-General launched the Every Woman Every Child Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health to help further the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda. The strategy builds on 15 years of progress under the Millennium Development Goals and the Every Woman Every Child (EWEC) movement. A key strategic priority for EWEC is to ensure strong implementation of the SDGs.

To this end, the UN Secretary-General appointed the Every Woman Every Child’s Independent Accountability Panel (IAP). The IAP is comprised of the distinguished panelists below from diverse regions and backgrounds that range from human rights experts to humanitarian leaders to statisticians. These panelists use the updated Global Strategy’s accountability framework—monitor, review and act—across the spectrum of issues that comprise the Global Strategy’s “Survive, Thrive, and Transform” themes. The IAP’s secretariat is independent and housed at PMNCH. (In 2019, the external evaluation of the IAP was commissioned and managed under the oversight of the EWEC Secretariat/UNFPA Evaluation Office and conducted by Dr. Allison Beattie. The final report is available here.)

IAP provides an independent and transparent review of progress on the implementation of the Global Strategy and identifies the necessary actions to accelerate achievement of its goals from the accountability perspective. It uses as a starting point the Strategy’s Indicator and Monitoring Framework. The IAP Terms of Reference are available here.

IAP is deeply committed to uncovering the root causes and finding solutions for the reduction of maternal and child deaths. IAP is committed to support the strengthening of national and sub-national accountability mechanisms and will rely upon their work to develop insights and recommendations.

The Panel produced its inaugural report: Old Challenges, New Hope in September 2016, during the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly. The report provided an independent assessment of progress and challenges to help strengthen the response from the international health community and countries. Since the first report, two additional reports have been launched at high-level events during the UN General Assembly: the 2017 Report Transformative Accountability for Adolescents and the 2018 Report on Private Sector: Who is Accountable?.  

On July 13, 2020, the Independent Accountability Panel launched its landmark 2020 report—“Caught in the COVID-19 storm: progress and accountability for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health in the context of UHC and SDGs”—and hosted a discussion on how stakeholders can act to protect those left behind during the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis in the margins of the High-Level Political Forum. Background materials, including the report and a recording of the event can be found here.

In addition to reports, the IAP also issues statements, briefs, editorials on critical accountability issues.  The IAP also carries forward the work of the Commission on Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health (CoIA). The CoIA produced 10 recommendations including the appointment of a nine-member independent Expert Review Group (iERG), hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO). The iERG’s 2014 report and the Global Strategy call for the establishment of the IAP to carry forward the work of the iERG into the SDG era.