Acting on the Call 2019: A Focus on the Journey to Self-Reliance for Preventing Child and Maternal Deaths

Since 2012, the governments in more than half of USAID’s priority countries for maternal and child survival have increased their domestic budgets for health.

For the past five years, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has identified and refined its strategy to prevent child and maternal deaths in annual Acting on the Call reports. This strategy outlines USAID’s approach to identifying and scaling up high-impact interventions to maximize our effectiveness in terms of saving the lives of women and children and increasing the capacity and commitment of partner countries. The Acting on the Call report lays out, and provides updates on, USAID’s commitment to prevent child and maternal deaths. As a result of our efforts, governments are allocating more resources to health and taking ownership of their own programs.

In the 2019 Acting on the Call report, we highlight key principles USAID has identified as important to achieve self-reliance, as well as how we can incorporate them to sustain our current and future impact. In the 2018 Acting on the Call report, we examined where countries are on their respective journeys, and in this report we assess how they can best accelerate progress. Many countries are at the beginning of their journeys, and none is nearing the end, which presents USAID with the opportunity to reorient our funding to both maximize impact and help these countries transform into self-reliant nations for health.

USAID’s strategy to prevent child and maternal deaths is grounded in supporting governments to plan, manage, and fund their own health systems — now and in the future. Leveraging diverse ideas, resources, and partners will stretch, build upon, and increase the impact of USAID’s investments.

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