The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) recently published a working paper, Maternal Health in Afghanistan. The paper is co-authored by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, fellow and deputy director of CFR’s Women and Foreign Policy program, and Isobel Coleman, Senior Fellow and Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative, Director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program. The paper argues that investment in maternal health in Afghanistan can provide a cost-effective way to promote strategic U.S. foreign policy objectives. According to Lemmon, these objectives include reducing maternal and child mortality, improving public health, empowering women, and fostering economic stability.
Reproductive health is often given a lower priority when factoring aid and development costs; however, the failure to secure the health of females and their unborn children can destabilize economies and harm already strained healthcare systems. It is clear that a larger focus must be placed on reproductive and maternal health to increase stability and sustainability in developing nations, especially those currently in armed conflict or post-conflict.
In June this year, a survey and poll by compiled by the Thomson Reuters Foundation ranked Afghanistan the most dangerous country for women, due to targeted violence against female public officials and other gender-based violence, minimal healthcare, and extreme poverty. The results of this poll places even more importance and backing on CFR working paper, especially in the area of maternal health. According to the paper’s findings:
“The benefits of improving maternal health in Afghanistan stretch far beyond women’s health: the impact is felt in community health, in women’s empowerment, in economic development, and in more secure communities. Indeed, few other interventions provide such broad-based returns for society. U.S. efforts to improve maternal health in Afghanistan, particularly in the area of midwifery, are one of its great unsung development success stories. However, although much hard work has been done, continued investment is required to realize the long-term potential of these initiatives. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that Afghanistan still needs roughly 7,400 additional midwives to attain 95 percent skilled birth attendance by 2015.95 If graduation and deployment levels remain at the current rate, there will be a shortage of approximately 4,000 midwives—a shortage that could unnecessarily jeopardize the lives of thousands of Afghan women.”
Investing in women and girls in Afghanistan is undoubtedly a “smart investment.” Health education and empowerment should not be taken lightly as a key to sustainable development and, as the paper illustrates, increasing foreign policy objectives.
