A Newswire special edition

March 27, 2026

This week, some 1,800 maternal and child health experts from at least 87 countries descended on Nairobi, Kenya, to a gathering overlooking the open savannah of the city’s national park — dotted with acacia trees and roaming wildlife. The country’s cabinet secretary for health, Aden Duale, jokingly warned them to be “very careful because the lions are not domesticated.”

But inside the International Maternal Newborn Health Conference, experts were less worried about the neighboring park’s wildcats than about the stubbornly high number of preventable deaths in low- and middle-income countries: A mother dies almost every two minutes while giving birth, and every 30 seconds a baby is stillborn in Africa. In 2024, some 4.9 million children died before turning 5 years old — including 2.3 million newborns.

I caught up with Dr. Jean Kaseya, director-general of Africa CDC, who headlined this year’s conference. One solution at the top of his mind is oxytocin — considered the first line of defense against post-partum hemorrhage. One thing that frustrates him? It’s not manufactured in Africa.

“Many women in Africa don’t have access to that,” he said. “We need to also manufacture that so that we can cut the price.”

This theme echoed throughout the conference: Most deaths can be prevented with low-cost interventions that already exist. There’s nothing inherently complicated about what needs to be done — but poverty and weak health systems prevent access and affordability. Both basic medicine and innovations, alike, struggle to scale.

Making the money count

Amid the drastic aid cuts, maternal, newborn, and child health donor funding was reduced by an estimated 58% in South Sudan last year, 55% in Kenya, and 52% in Uganda, according to a 10-country analysis by PATH. Cuts led to supply disruptions of essential medicines, workforce shortages, and disrupted community outreach.

The new U.S. bilateral agreements are expected to include maternal and child health funding, but not every country is signing on, and many questions remain around the rollout.

Given the bleak realities, countries must prioritize maternal and newborn interventions that work for their own contexts, experts in Nairobi said.

“Resources will never be enough. The first thing is to get the interventions right,” said Dr. Owen Chikhwaza, director of reproductive health for Malawi’s Ministry of Health.

Too often, commodities don’t reach women and newborns at the right time and at sufficient scale, said the Gates Foundation’s Laura Lamberti. This is rooted in a failure to translate evidence into priorities and financing. Instead, there’s delayed procurement, stockouts, and emergency purchasing at higher costs, she said.

But there are efforts to help countries weigh the best investments. For example, the Institute for Global Health Metrics and Evaluation developed a tool for better understanding localized health burdens, which can help countries prioritize.

And research from PATH’s Dr. Caleb Mike Mulongo documented ways some countries responded to cuts: South Sudan partnered with the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation; Ethiopia enrolled more households in community-based health insurance; and Malawi established a national health insurance fund.

This week, countries also shared experiences with one another. For example, the APT-Sepsis trial in Malawi and Uganda demonstrated a 32% reduction in infection-related mortality and severe morbidity through early detection, prevention, and management of maternal sepsis.

Dr. Mariatou Tala Jallow, new director for Africa CDC’s Africa Pooled Procurement Mechanism.

Finding the funds

In Nairobi, several financing options for commodities access were highlighted:

Unitaid launched a $52 million investment during the conference to make 10 lifesaving tools accessible in Africa. The tools include magnesium sulfate, which can more than halve the risk of seizures for pregnant women with severe preeclampsia. It costs less than $1, yet many women can’t access it. Amref Health Africa and the Clinton Health Access Initiative will lead the rollout of this new effort.
The World Bank’s Global Financing Facility’s Edward Llewellyn previewed a new financing program for family planning and maternal and child health commodities that they’re planning to formally launch at the bank’s Spring Meetings next month. It’s a matching program for commodities, but also includes financing for addressing bottlenecks that impact last-mile access, affordability, and quality.
The African Development Bank’s Sylvie Mahieu-Sorensen spoke about their planned partnership with the Gates Foundation to increase liquidity for debt-stricken countries to buy essential health commodities in a timely way. They’re planning to pilot the Africa Medicines and Equipment Facility, or AMEF, this year in two countries. This new facility is slated to go before AfDB’s board in June for approval.

Mahieu-Sorensen said the real issue with health commodities in Africa is timing. “The issue comes with the lag between the allocation decision and the moment those products hit the shelf,” she said.
Alice Kang’ethe, the CEO of the Beginnings Fund, which launched last year, is working to deploy philanthropic capital to reduce maternal and newborn mortality. This type of capital has the advantage of being able to push early adoption of innovations, she said. It’s early days for the fund, but they’re taking a “very deliberate approach” in co-designing investments with governments.

Read: GFF to launch family planning, maternal, child commodity finance program

Elevate your development work. Begin your 15-day free trial of Devex Pro and instantly access our comprehensive suite of resources: expert analysis, insider briefings, an extensive funding database, curated event listings, and a library of exclusive content designed to keep you ahead.

RSV-Ping for access

One innovation countries are preparing to roll out is the vaccine to prevent respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, which affects almost all babies. Having the infection early in life can lead to long-term respiratory consequences. The vaccine is administered to mothers to pass along immunity to newborns.

It’s shown success in high-income countries, but the greatest burden of RSV mortality is in Africa. Not a single low- or lower-middle-income country has introduced this vaccine, but Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is gearing up to support its introduction. Fifty-six countries are eligible to apply for support to introduce new vaccines. But this vaccine is within Gavi’s “discretionary” programs, so countries will decide if it’s a priority. And rollout is expected to start in 2028.

The Africa Health Governance Institute’s Dr. Nelly Bosire cautioned countries to tread carefully. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated that rolling out new vaccines can open a Pandora’s box of misinformation. Social media “can work for us or can work against us,” she said. “We have to be very, very careful in how we position the RSV vaccine.”

A panel during the International Maternal Newborn Health Conference in Nairobi, Kenya.

The ‘slow lane’ toward scale

Elina Urli Hodges, assistant director of programs at Duke’s Global Health Innovation Center, told me her research showed some maternal and child health products take nearly 30 years to launch and scale in low- and middle-income countries, with the median timeframe being 17.5 years.

Maternal child health products, in particular, were slower to scale than products for infectious diseases and neglected tropical diseases, she said.

That’s why local manufacturing and pooled procurement dominated many conversations this week, as ways to strengthen supply and stabilize prices.

This includes the development of the Africa CDC’s Africa Pooled Procurement Mechanism. Kaseya told me that in recent months, Dr. Mariatou Tala Jallow joined his team to serve as the new director of this continental pooled procurement mechanism.

She’s a leading expert in this field, having designed the Global Fund’s procurement system. She had retired from the Global Fund, but Kaseya asked her to leave retirement and consider joining Africa CDC instead.

“I said: ‘We need you. Come to design the Africa Pooled Procurement Mechanism as you did with the [Global Fund’s] system,’” he told me. “We are looking for people on a daily basis who can come and bring the agenda of the continent to another level.”

Jallow told me that the pooled procurement mechanism started as a pilot project with 10 countries focusing on maternal and child health products. But Africa CDC is still in the midst of developing the mechanism to serve the continent more broadly on a wider range of products.

She’s optimistic that ongoing efforts to transform procurement will be transformational.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are moving into the fast lane, so strap your belts and be ready,” she told conference participants.

And while putting commodities into the hands of health workers is critical to save lives, investing in this workforce, more broadly, is key, experts emphasized.

“The real investment has to be in midwives if we are serious in saving lives over the coming few years,” said Dr. Ayman Abdelmohsen, chief of the sexual and reproductive health and rights branch at the United Nations Population Fund.

For more in-depth content like this, consider signing up to Devex CheckUp — our free weekly newsletter that provides front-line and behind-the-scenes reporting on global health.

Thank you for reading this special edition of the Newswire, edited by Rumbi Chakamba, copy edited by Nicole Tablizo, and produced by Mariane Samson. Have a news tip? Email [email protected].

Forwarded by a friend?

Devex thanks our partners for supporting our newsletters.
Our editorial content remains independent.
Interested in partnering with us? Get in touch.

Would you recommend our content?

Connect with us: