TORONTO, June 26 (Xinhua) -- Leaders of the eight richest nations adopted an initiative on promoting maternal and child health on Saturday when the two-day G8 summit concluded at Muskoka, Ontario, Canada.
The G8 Muskoka Initiative: Maternal, Newborn and Under-Five Child Health was disclosed in a declaration, Recovery and New Beginnings, issued by the summit.
The Initiative sets the Global Targets as between 2010 and 2015, the G8 will work with multiple partners throughout the global community with the objective of achieving the targets set in 2001 for Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5.
The goals are reduce by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate; reduce by three-quarters, also between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio; and achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health.
To this end, the G8 promised to mobilize as of today 5.0 billion U.S. dollars of additional funding for disbursement over the next five years, adding that G8 members already contribute over 4.1 billion dollars annually in international development assistance for maternal, newborn and under-five child health.
The G-8 leaders anticipates that over the period 2010-2015, the Muskoka Initiative will mobilize significantly greater than 10 billion dollars, and will assist developing countries to prevent 1. 3 million deaths of children under five years of age; prevent 64, 000 maternal deaths; and enable access to modern methods of family planning by an additional 12 million couples.
This Initiative includes elements such as: antenatal care; attended childbirth; post-partum care; sexual and reproductive health care and services, including voluntary family planning; health education; treatment and prevention of diseases including infectious diseases; prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV; immunizations; basic nutrition and relevant actions in the field of safe drinking water and sanitation.
"Support from the G8 is catalytic," the declaration said. "We make our commitments with the objective of generating a greater collective effort by bilateral and multilateral donors, developing countries and other stakeholders to accelerate progress on MDGs 4 and 5."
The Initiative stressed that reaching these overall targets requires a major, sustained global effort including developed, emerging and developing countries, foundations, international agencies, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, and other constituencies.
It also stressed that it is critical to maximize the impact of all investments in development through improved coherence, coordination and harmonization of development efforts, and increasing the effectiveness of existing mechanisms and approaches.
"We are not creating new funding mechanisms. Each donor is free to choose the mechanisms they consider most effective, including multilateral agencies, civil society partners, and direct bilateral support to developing country partners," the Initiative concluded.
