C2C was asked to present at a conference of Fulbright scholars from the developing world – all studying at universities in the US – on the intersection between innovations in science and technology and global health issues. There were about 80 scholars in attendance and two other panelists in addition to me:

Dr. Bill Rodriguez founded Daktari Diagnostics, which is creating low-cost, durable field equipment for CD4 tests (which measure the load of HIV disease-fighting cells in blood; it’s the leading test for assessing HIV stage and prognosis). Prior to starting Daktari, Dr. Rodriguez returned to Harvard (where he’d been on faculty and started research programs in global health policy and global health diagnostics) and helped launch the Global Health Delivery Project. He has served as a consultant to the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on global HIV and tuberculosis treatment, has been an advisor to more than a dozen national governments, and served as a member of the WHO’s global HIV guidelines committee.

Jennifer Staples-Clark founded Unite For Sight while a sophomore at Yale University in fall 2000. With Jennifer’s leadership and vision as Chief Executive Officer, Unite For Sight is now a leading global health delivery organization that provides cost-effective care to the world’s poorest people. By investing human and financial resources into the social ventures of eye clinics in developing countries, Unite For Sight has provided eye care to more than 1.2 million people living in extreme poverty, including more than 42,000 sight-restoring surgeries.

These are heavyweights in the “technological solutions applied to health problems” space, and it was a great honor for me to be speaking alongside them. That’s an environment that most charges me – a space where a group of highly motivated and creative people get together to discuss new ways of tackling old problems.

One thing I talked about yesterday that C2C hasn’t discussed previously is the idea of the Three Delays, which I offer as reasons for the gap between known essential care treatments and the women and children who are dying for lack of access to them.
1) The delay in deciding to seek care, which speaks to a lack of education in the patient population.
2) The delay in reaching care, which suggests a lack of adequate infrastructure, specifically that infrastructure is not proximal to the needy populations.
3) The delay in accessing quality care, which points to an inadequacy of clinical training and/or diagnostic and pharmaceutical resources.

C2C seeks to tackle all three of these delays with our bifurcated model of facility (infrastructure, #2) and program support to local partners (education and resources, #s 1 and 3).

Another thing I discussed in yesterday’s presentation were reasons beyond “we know what works” for focusing health services on women and children. Specifically, that it’s good business (the return on investment is high: money spent on primary health ed and services now returns exponential savings in healthcare costs to health systems later) and good foreign economic policy (10 of the 15 largest importers of US goods and services are graduates of US foreign aid programs, and women in the developing world make up the largest emerging market this planet has ever seen). I find these arguments extremely compelling. It’s not an entirely emotional investment; rather, a sound economic move.

I’m returning to the Fulbright conference tomorrow to participate on a judging panel as teams of students present interventions based on case studies of global epidemics (HIV), natural disasters (cyclones), and localized disease outbreaks (cholera). I’m looking forward to more dynamic and thoughtful discussion!

According to Forbes Magazine’s annual Mother’s Day survey, Americans love their moms to the tune of $15.7 billion. More than 9 out of 10 consumers plan to celebrate Mother’s Day, and on average we’ll each spend $148, up 5% from last year. No one here is doubting that Mom deserves a very serious “thank you” for 9 months of raging hormones, stretch marks, childbirth and a lifetime of ego-boosting and moral support. No. One. In fact, my mom gets a 70% cut of all the profits I make from this blog. (“That can’t possibly be true.” I mean, technically, it’s not false –>profits=0.) However, what if half of those of us planning to celebrate made a donation in honor of our moms and in support of other women struggling with motherhood around the world? That’s $7.85 billion we could invest in health strategies, education systems, and economic opportunities bent on women and motherhood.

To put that in perspective, the U.S. now spends $474 million on the problems faced by women, and the Obama administration’s proposed 2012 budget would add another $372 million for a total $864 mil. That’s 11% of what HALF of American consumers planning to celebrate Mother’s Day will spend, which is just wild.

As Hallmark Holiday consumers, we spend a lot. Collectively, it follows, we could also save a lot.

Christy Turlington Burns’ directorial debut, “No Woman No Cry,” is having its US TV broadcast premiere on the Oprah Winfrey Network May 7th at 9:30 ET. To check out Turlington Burn’s recommendations for how to watch and get involved with spreading the word, click here.

In her gripping directorial debut, Christy Turlington Burns shares the powerful stories of at-risk pregnant women in four parts of the world, including a remote Maasai tribe in Tanzania, a slum of Bangladesh, a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala, and a prenatal clinic in the United States.

Save the Children released its annual State of the World’s Mothers report today, and I’ve been pouring over it all morning. The statistics, the calls for increased public investment have played many times before by everyone from C2C to the UN. What’s new and most effective about the report, I think, is a series of essays from business, national security, political, economic and arts leaders. One I’d like to highlight is from Anne Mulcahy, former CEO of Xerox Corporation.

It’s an intuitive no-brainer that investment in global maternal health is “good”. When we get down to the brass tacks, what evidence do we have to support that claim? If we’re to see meaningful change, there has to be more to it than sentimentalism for moms and motherhood and a belief in the human right to basic healthcare. If what we seek is sustainable funding sources and impactful program planning, then we need data-driven rationale. So, let’s look at pitching investment in maternal health the way we’d drive any other investment decision.

First, we know what solutions work. We’re not paying for R&D (research and development) anymore. We’re investing in low-cost, low-tech programs focused on skilled attendance during birth, vaccines, basic antibiotics, and anti-malarials. Basic medical science, tried and true, low risk of failure (controlling for human behavior and user error) to funders.

Second, the ROI (return on investment) is high. This, directly from Ms. Mulcahy:

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that a dollar spent to provide family planning, education and services to low-income women returns four dollars in savings on later healthcare. The World Bank says keeping a young girl in class raises her adult income by about 9 percent for every year of her schooling. According to the Women’s Learning Partnership, for every year beyond fourth grade that girls attend school, and entire country’s wages rise by 20 percent. And another recent study shows that mothers put 90 percent of their income into family and community, compared to 30 percent from men.

Third, it’s an economic boon for the U.S. Women are the biggest emerging market in the planet’s history (although, they might have always been…). As the recession subsides, it’s anticipated that most of the economic growth will come from developing countries, which is something the US is increasingly dependent on (again, not sure what the correlation is, here, but I imagine it has something to do with either global security and the homogenization of our economic and social interests or trade balances.)

I want to add a “Four” here, so we’re going to hop over to the essay by retired US Army Colonel John Agoglia on investing in women as sound national security policy. Col. Agoglia led counter-insurgency training in Afghanistan for over two years. Afghanistan is ranked the #1 worst country to be a mother; 1 in 11 women will die there from complications of pregnancy and childbirth for lack of the same things cited by Ms. Mulcahy (again, we KNOW what works). The logic chain Col. Agoglia uses goes something like this: Every woman they engaged with medicine and basic food supplies and healthcare, engaged a family. Each family engendered a growing community of “gratitude and hope.” Better health for the women meant more productivity and optimism for the future, which increased the likelihood that their children would be kept in school. With education, family income rose and radical solutions seemed less appealing. In sum, protecting women’s health allows them to realize their full value to society, makes them more self-sufficient and less motivated to extremism.

Investing in mothers is good business. It doesn’t require new medicines or technology; its returns are locally significant; and its sound economic and national security policy for the U.S.

Now, let’s make sure the U.S. budget for humanitarian and poverty-focused development doesn’t get cut!

As we are drawn to reflect on how to honor and thank our mothers on May 8th , I am fortunate to have more than one mother to acknowledge and thank. As an adoptive parent of two phenomenal children ages 8 and 10, I have two additional mothers who have been powerful forces in the life of my family . Twice, I stood by my children’s birthmothers in the delivery room while each of my children was born. I was fortunate to build a relationship over months to the two strong, young mothers who knew that they were not ready to raise their unborn children and chose me to adopt and care for the infants they were soon to deliver. For some, it’s a complicated issue to understand–why would a mother give up her child at birth? And it may really only be the adoptive parent who can truly understand that an adopted child can be loved and treasured just as deeply if born of another woman’s womb. I bonded immediately with my infants and the gift I received from these two women has forever changed my life.

My children were delivered in well-staffed and resourced hospitals after nine months of quality prenatal care. That simply is not the case for the majority of women around the world. Millions of women every day cannot access a functioning healthcare clinic that is staffed with clinicians and has the medicine they need to stay healthy. Pregnant women face these barriers everyday and the result is devastating. This Sunday on Mother’s day, over 2,000 women will die from complications of pregnancy–and yet those complications could have been averted if they had access to perinatal care or were able to get to a functional clinic when their complications arose.

Prior to adopting my children I worked in rural Cambodia and East Africa for a decade as a clinician and could recall several times when a mother passed her tiny newborn to me. She wanted me to take the baby home because she was too weak due to anemia or malaria–chronic illnesses that make it nearly impossible to manage a resource-poor household and to keep young children nourished and safe. I treated women with post-partum hemorrhage or with urgent infections from septic abortions. I held five month old babies who were not named at birth because their mothers knew that they were underweight and undernourished and might not survive. I saw, first hand, the barriers that pregnant women face and the consequences that result and I was forever changed. I was drawn and determined to bring awareness to this global problem. I worked first as a clinician and now as an advocate to serve this population.

I co-founded C2C 2 ½ years ago with another phenomenal woman, Allison Howard Berry. We were both driven by the belief that woman and children in resource poor communities should have a right to simple primary healthcare. Our innovative model converts used shipping containers into high quality medical clinics and deploys them in partnerships with local organizations that staff and operate them with the aim to improve the outcomes for pregnant women and their infants.

On this Mother’s Day, I have three mothers to thank and countless women to honor as they serve as the foundations of their community, their families and the world.

Good.is and Cole Haan teamed up and are asking folks to submit doodles that inspire them – anything in the world, skies the limit. Prizes include gift certificates to Cole Haan of monetary amounts that reflect your creative talents 🙂 Check it:

Yes, I have the power of C2C’s new generator. A few months ago, Grace Children’s hospital started having trouble with the facilities behemoth generator; as a result, operations in the C2C clinic were stressed: no AC, and as power came in and out so too came our ability to run lab tests.

Energy and electricity are vital for development.  In Haiti, consistent electricity is a luxury. The city of Port-au-Prince can’t meet its constituents’ energy demands, so we often have blackouts. As such, power inverters and generators are a big business here and their prices are quite high. But when you’re running a health facility, you assume those costs because the ends justifies the means.

The C2C laboratory was suffering enormously from the erratic electricity. Imagine a patient who comes to the lab for a test, the lab tech does the blood drawn and starts the test on the centrifuge machine or the thermo spectronic  and zap! the power shut down. Then the blood sample is no good anymore and the patient who’ll come for her result the day after will be surprised to know that she will be subjected to a new blood draw instead. This wasteful scenario happened a few times recently, and as it became clear that GCH was not close to a solution for the hospital power, I took matters into my own hands.

Now, I have the power.  You can’t imagine how I feel as facility manager every time a patient is getting angry at the lab tech and then the lab tech turns her look at me as to say: “You see what you’ve done”. Now, we are all happy, and the biggest happiness will come from the patients when they get their lab test results on time and when they won’t need to be subject to multiple blood draws.

Yes, I have the power to continue providing high quality health care to so many women in need.

Two weeks ago, Liz Sheehan and C2C Chairman of the Board, Keith Angell, went out to California to visit the construction site of the second clinic under production with Allied Container Systems as well as to attend the premiere of Christy Turlington Burns’ directorial debut “No Woman No Cry,” the powerful stories of at-risk pregnant women in four parts of the world, including a remote Maasai tribe in Tanzania, a slum of Bangladesh, a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala, and a prenatal clinic in the United States.