Monday $1.5 billion for women’s health was awarded through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in conjunction with the United Nations. The move aims to improve women and children’s health by coordination between non-profit organizations and governments around the globe.
The global health initiatives will help nations fight the problems of AIDS and poor nutrition.
At the upcoming G-20 Summit hosted in Toronto, Canada, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he would petition the participating nations to pool $15 billion to add to the program.
“We may need an additional $45 billion by 2015,” the Secretary-General said.
Gates and Ban outlined a program up to 2014 designed to promote safer childbirths and contraception, strengthening the foundation’s nutrition and vaccination initiatives.
“The women and children are always last in line for health issues. It’s just morally unacceptable … This is a real human rights issue,” Ban added.
“Getting strong support from a foundation like Melinda and Bill Gates is a strong political tool for me,” he said.
To assist the program, Ban insisted that poor, developing nations put forth no less than 15 percent of their budgets to supplement the U.N.-Gates initiative.
According to Gates, “they can make policy changes that make an enormous difference to women and children. This is a government issue and it is going to take large-scale government funding to make it work.”
The Gates Foundation, established by Microsoft’s Bill Gates along with his wife, Melinda, promised $60 million for Ethiopia and $94 million for India.
Mrs. Gates, specifically praised Ethiopia’s effort to raise health standards by the government’s opening 15,000 clinics.
In April Dr. Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington said childbirth related deaths in women have dropped 35 percent across all nations. The group also estimated children’s deaths under the age of five dropped to 7.7 million in 2010 from 11.9 million in 1990.
