The Midwifery Accelerator: expanding health care for women and newborns

Investing in midwives is a cost-effective and sustainable strategy to improve maternal and newborn health and well-being and reduce mortality. There is ample evidence to show that care provided by midwives is women centric, significantly advances maternal and newborn health outcomes, strengthens health systems, and helps build future healthier generations. Investments in quality midwifery care can help accelerate progress towards the achievement of sustainable development goals for health (SDG3) and gender equality (SDG5). Educated and regulated midwives can deliver 90% of essential sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, and adolescent health services. Achieving universal coverage of care provided by midwives can help avert almost two thirds of maternal and newborn deaths and stillbirths. This translates to over 4.3 million lives saved per year by 2035.

As countries strive to make the most of limited resources, midwifery models of care offer a proven, cost-effective and sustainable solution to achieve the best possible health outcomes. Investing in midwife-provided care yields substantial economic and social benefits, with a return of $16 for every $1 invested. Despite their huge impact, midwives form only 10% of the global sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, and adolescent health workforce and the potential of midwifery models of care remains persistently unrecognised and underutilized. As a result,  the world continues to face a deficit of 900,000 midwives. Chronic and systemic underfunding, increased medicalisation and routine use of unnecessary interventions, further hindered by gender barriers in the health system and societies at large are major barriers to improving midwifery care.

The Midwifery Accelerator is a unified, evidence-driven global initiative aimed at significantly improving maternal and newborn health outcomes by scaling up midwifery models of care globally. It’s a coalition of UN health agencies (UNFPA, WHO, UNICEF) and International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), Jhpiego, governments, funders, civil society, academia, private sector and other key stakeholders working together to integrate high-quality midwifery services into national health systems.This accelerator offers governments, funding partners and stakeholders a clear set of common, high-level priorities to align efforts, optimize investments and achieve measurable impact. Seven high-level priority actions are organized in three pillars as follows:

Pillar 1: Commit – Invest: Strengthen policy frameworks, and increase domestic and global investments.

Pillar 2: Educate – Deploy – Retain: Ensure quality education and professional development for midwives; deploy midwives strategically and retain midwives by creating a safe, supportive and accountable workplace.

Pillar 3: Advocate – Empower: Build midwife leadership, strengthen coalitions and amplify voices of women and communities for effective advocacy and accountability.

This Midwifery Accelerator builds on the Global Position Paper on Transitioning to Midwifery Models of Care that outlines  “why” this investment is crucial. The Midwifery Implementation Guidance provides step-by-step details on “how” these priority actions can be effectively implemented. 

This accelerator also aligns governments and partners around shared programme goals, and strategies to ensure sustainable impact at scale. It sets a strong global advocacy agenda to share best practices, and reinforce political commitments and financing. 

This accelerator contributes towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular relevant targets under SDG 3 (health and wellbeing) and SDG 5 (gender equality). In recognition that every health system is unique in how services are organized and delivered, financed, regulated and governed, the accelerators offer a set of priorities, and countries need to adapt their actions to their specific context. In line with the Every Woman Every Newborn Everywhere initiative, this accelerator builds a powerful coalition to ensure safe, respectful, and high-quality before, during and after pregnancy, childbirth and beyond to dramatically improve health and well-being outcomes for all women and newborns. 

Join the movement and be part of the global effort to end preventable maternal and newborn deaths and promote health and well-being for women and children everywhere. Click here to contact us.