This year, almost 11 million children under five years of age will die from causes that are largely preventable. At the same time, about half a million women will die in pregnancy, childbirth or soon after. If progress is to be made, health systems have to be strengthened and known effective approaches utilized to make good care accessible to populations.

At Forum 9 in Mumbai in September 2005, OCHRC organized a plenary session on child and maternal. The theme of the session was reducing global disparities in maternal and child health. Marian E. Jacobs, Director, Child Health Unit, School of Child and Adolescent Health, University of Cape Town chaired the session. The key note speakers were Daniel Makuto, Director, Office of the Assistant Director-General, Family and Community Health, World Health Organization, Igor Rudan, Associate Professor, Public Health Sciences, University of Edinburgh and Abbas Bhuiya, Head, Social and Behavioural Sciences Programme, Public Health Sciences, ICDDRB.

In his presentation Daniel Makuto discussed the importance of scaling up access to health care for mothers and children as essential for reducing the toll of child and maternal deaths. While it is technically feasible to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for child health within the next decade, universal access for maternal and newborn care is further away. Issues to be addressed are workforce shortages, workforce remuneration and public financial commitment to allocating funds to strengthen health care systems to provide universal access. He also said there is a consensus that maternal, newborn and child health programmes will only be effective if together, with households and communities, they establish a continuum of care. A sustained political commitment to mobilize the essential human and financial resources and the placement of maternal, newborn and child health at the core of these efforts are required to approach universal coverage for mothers and children.

A description of maternal and child health care in the developing world was offered by Abbas Bhuiya, Centre for Health and Population Research (ICDDR,B) in Bangladesh: "The developing world has witnessed a significant improvement in child and maternal health in the recent past, but the improvement has been far from equitable among countries and in various social groups within countries. The disadvantaged segments of society are burdened with more poor health and deaths than the better-off people. When health workers at the grassroots level see the full potential for modern health services not getting down to the disadvantaged, they feel frustrated. Similarly, development workers feel helpless when confronted with the poor health of the disadvantaged, which keeps them from making the most of the development input. The challenge for us is to find ways to break the mutually reinforcing cycle of disadvantage and poor health. Poor health in developing nations is not due so much to lack of available scientific knowledge. It is rather the failure of the system to make use of the existing knowledge for the benefit of the disadvantaged."

Igor Rudan presented a new methodology for systematic priority setting in global child health research. The methodology is primarily based on the major progress achieved recently in defining and dissecting components of the global burden of disease and death in children. The methodology is anticipated to compare the long term strategic research investments with the areas that have traditionally been ignored in biomedical research, health policy and systems research, implementation and delivery research, equity in resource allocation and in prioritizing the needs of the largest population groups that could benefit from research investments which are often the poorest.