Why Don't We Have a Global Fund for Maternal Health?

Asks a Tanzanian doctor in a Times article Sunday.

Well, cause someone would steal the money anyway. No? Ok, how about because the international community is preoccupied (is obsessed too strong a word?) by the much more exotic sounding tropical and infectious diseases (a virus that turns your insides to mush = exciting/terrifying, bleeding to death giving birth = boring). Not everyone gets Ebola or HIV or malaria, but most people either give birth or are the direct cause of someone else giving birth (and if nothing else, at least someone once gave birth to them). So maternal health is ordinary, banal, and just plain not-sexy. That is, unless it is tied to something exotic (see Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV -- PMTCT)...

The wards described in the article of the Tanzanian hospital are not different from those in Uganda. In Mugalo Hospital, around 80 to 100 babies are delivered every day, and there are certainly not enough beds for all the mothers. One medical student working in the labour ward described to me how the "fluids" from one mother giving birth flowed into the ears of another mother who was sharing her mattress one night during his shift.

I don't know what the solution is to the neglect of maternal health. In Uganda, maternal mortality statistics have barely budged in the past 20 years. The 2006 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey (depressingly) discusses the lack of improvement with regard to maternal mortality:

At first glance, it would appear that the maternal mortality ratio has declined significantly
over the last five years, from 527 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births for the ten-year period prior to the 1995 UDHS to 505 for the ten-year period before the 2000-01 UDHS, and to 435 for the ten- year period before the 2006 UDHS. However, the methodology used and the sample sizes implemented in these three surveys do not allow for precise estimates of maternal mortality. The sampling errors around each of the estimates are large and, consequently, the estimates are not significantly different; thus, it is impossible to say with confidence that maternal mortality has declined. Moreover, a decline in the maternal mortality ratio is not supported by the trends in related indicators, such as antenatal care coverage, delivery in health facilities, and medical assistance at delivery, all of which have increased only marginally over the last ten years.