Safe Motherhood Case Studies: Learning with Stakeholders in South Asia—An Introduction

The international community resolved in 1987 to reduce maternal mortality around the world. This resolution was strengthened in 2001 when 189 countries signed the Millennium Declaration, committing themselves to Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 towards improvement of maternal health. To accelerate national progress towards achievement of MDG 5, a deeper understanding of what works at scale is needed. This demands a common framework for measuring progress within and across countries and learning processes that engage national stakeholders in using local evidence for programmatic decision-making, identifying critical bottlenecks in scaling up, and generating contextspecific implementation solutions (1,2). However, progress has been slow and uneven. Now, as two decades ago, more than 500,000 women die each year from pregnancy-related complications—nearly half in South Asia.