Publisher/Organizer: The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Publication date: February 2016 Number of pages: 68 Language: En

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Executive Summary

2015 was a landmark year for the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health and for the SRMNCAH community. In September - the same month that the Partnership observed the 10th anniversary of its creation in 2005 to accelerate action on MDG 4 and 5 - the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that established global development priorities for the next 15 years. SDG 3 (Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages) includes new targets for reducing maternal, newborn, under-five mortality and sexual and reproductive health. Other SDGs address issues of critical importance to the SRMNCAH community, including education, gender equality, sexual and reproductive rights, nutrition, governance and accountability, and continued efforts to strengthen development partnerships.

The Partnership – its Board members, partners, Secretariat and champions – were closely involved in advocacy related to the development of the SDGs throughout the year, including through the Partnership’s Post-2015 Working Group representing more than 50 partner organizations across all eight constituencies. The Partnership’s advocacy particularly focused on ensuring that the SDGs emphasize areas in which progress has lagged, such as stillbirths, newborns, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and adolescent health.

An updated Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health 2016-2030

Throughout 2015, the Partnership recognized the need to reshape and closely align the SRMNCAH agenda with the evolving SDG framework. The Partnership provided strong support for the development of the updated Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health 2016-2030 by coordinating a global consultation process that enabled the voices of more than 7,000 individuals and organizations to be heard. This included civil society meetings in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Panama, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, USA and Vietnam, as well as two regional consultations, citizens’ hearings in 23 countries in Africa and Asia, a focused effort to reach youth and adolescents and extensive inputs received through the Partnership’s online consultation hub. The consultations ensured that the updated Global Strategy is based on the priorities and needs of affected communities and that it receives broad commitment and support across the diverse SRMNCAH constituencies. The Partnership also led on the development of papers for work streams on advocacy, accountability and humanitarian settings that informed the updated Strategy

In the updated Global Strategy, the Partnership has a clear role to play in engaging and aligning global stakeholders and promoting accountability, and will link this work to support for country planning and implementation (led by the H4+ and partners) and financing (led by the GFF Investors Group).

The Global Financing Facility: a new funding model to achieve the SDGs

The Partnership was an early contributor to the design of the GFF, which was launched in July 2015. More than 1,400 individuals and organizations contributed views on the GFF in online consultations and in-person meetings facilitated by the Partnership during its design phase in 2014 and 2015. A report summarizing these consultations was released by the Partnership in January 2015 and fed into the consultation process on the updated Global Strategy. The Partnership also played a key role in supporting civil society and private sector contributions to the development of the GFF and coordinating the selection of civil society and private sector representatives to its governing bodies.

Strengthening accountability in women’s, children’s and adolescent health

As part of its role in coordinating global accountability efforts under a unified accountability framework, the Partnership Board agreed in October to host the Secretariat for the Independent Accountability Panel (IAP) established in the updated Global Strategy. The Partnership also helped to coordinate nominations for the selection of the Panel’s members by the UN Secretary-General in late 2015. A first report from the IAP will be delivered in 2016, with more extensive reports on the global state of women’s, children’s and adolescent’s health and progress under the Global Strategy to be produced from 2017.

Generating commitments to the updated Global Strategy

The Partnership worked closely in 2015 with the H4+ partners and members of the Every Woman Every Child movement to secure commitments to the updated Global Strategy. This included the development of resource materials, a communication strategy, outreach letters to constituency members and direct contact with potential commitment-makers. By the end of 2015, these efforts had resulted in an estimated U$25 billion in financial commitments through more than 140 written commitments from a broad range of stakeholders, including more than 40 national governments.

Delivering on the Partnership’s Strategic Framework 2012-2015

In the last year of the Partnership’s Strategic Framework 2012-2015, the Partnership continued to deliver on its core priorities of advocacy, knowledge dissemination and accountability, including through the publication of a new knowledge summary on human rights in the context of SRMNCAH and hosting or coordinating multi-stakeholder policy dialogues in Mozambique, Bangladesh and Zambia. The 2015 edition of the Partnership’s annual accountability report, Strengthening accountability: Achievements and perspectives for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health, presents the final update on financial commitments to the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health 2010-2015 and looks ahead to the implementation of the updated Global Strategy for 2016-2030 by providing recommendations on how to advance accountability efforts.

The 10th and final Countdown to 2015 report, A Decade of Tracking Progress for Maternal, Newborn and Child Survival was also published in 2015. The report includes an updated country profile for each of the 75 Countdown countries, which together account for more than 95% of the world’s maternal, newborn, and child deaths. The Partnership, which served as the Secretariat and main advocacy partner for Countdown during the past 10 years, will remain a close partner of the future Countdown initiative, to be known as Countdown to 2030. The next Countdown will continue its global reporting and production of country profiles focused on coverage of interventions. It will also increase its country focus by establishing a network of regional centres responsible for preparing independent assessments. Countdown’s data and technical analyses will continue to be fed into other global accountability processes, such as the annual reports to be produced by the Independent Accountability Panel.

A new Strategic Plan for 2016-2020

The Partnership’s Strategic Plan for 2016 to 2020 was developed in light of changes in the external environment, including the transition from the MDGs to the SDGs and the updated Global Strategy, as well as a process of internal reflection on experience delivering on the Strategic Framework 2012-2015 and an independent external evaluation of the Partnership conducted in 2014.

The process of developing the Strategic Plan required the Partnership to explore several key strategic challenges throughout the course of 2015. To ensure that the Partnership is more closely engaged with countries, an intensive consultation process involving around 50 country governments was undertaken to ascertain countries’ expectations of the Partnership and its role in supporting and engaging with countries at global, regional and country levels. In October, the Board formally