Approaches to reducingmaternal mortality: Oxfam and the MDGs

The political momentum of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), coupled with a technical consensus about how to tackle maternal mortality, greatly improves the prospect of reducing women's death and disability rates. In its campaigning and advocacy work on the MDGs, Oxfam will focus on the need to raise the national and international finance for the investments that this requires. Finance is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for change to the lives of millions of women who suffer as a result of pregnancy and childbirth – and it is sorely lacking. This is no argument for technical quick-fixes, however. International efforts to reduce maternal mortality must concentrate on improving health systems – a project that entails rebuilding states to deliver services – but they must also look to an advocacy grounded in women's rights, as articulated in the Beijing Platform for Action and the Cairo process.