Quality maternity care for every woman, everywhere: a call to action.

To improve maternal health requires action to ensure quality maternal health care for all women and girls, and to guarantee access to care for those outside the system. In this paper, we highlight some of the most pressing issues in maternal health and ask: what steps can be taken in the next 5 years to catalyse action toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goal target of less than 70 maternal deaths per 100 000 livebirths by 2030, with no single country exceeding 140? What steps can be taken to ensure that high-quality maternal health care is prioritised for every woman and girl everywhere? We call on all stakeholders to work together in securing a healthy, prosperous future for all women. National and local governments must be supported by development partners, civil society, and the private sector in leading efforts to improve maternal-perinatal health.

Power and Politics in the Global Health Landscape: Beliefs, Competition and Negotiation Among Global Advocacy Coalitions in the Policy-Making Process.

Background: Advocacy coalitions play an increasingly prominent role within the global health landscape, linking actors and institutions to attract political attention and resources. This paper examines how coalitions negotiate among themselves and exercise hidden forms of power to produce policy on the basis of their beliefs and strategic interests.

Methods: This paper examines the beliefs and behaviours of health advocacy coalitions using Sabatier's Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) as an informal theoretical lens.

Discourse, ideas and power in global health policy networks: political attention for maternal and child health in the millennium development goal era.

Background: Maternal and child health issues have gained global political attention and resources in the past 10 years, due in part to their prominence on the Millennium Development Goal agenda and the use of evidence-based advocacy by policy networks. This paper identifies key factors for this achievement, and raises questions about prospective challenges for sustaining attention in the transition to the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, far broader in scope than the Millennium Development Goals.

Methods: This paper relies on participant observation methods and document analysis to develop a case study of the behaviours of global maternal and child health advocacy networks during 2005-2015.

Stillbirths: ending preventable deaths by 2030.

Efforts to achieve the new worldwide goals for maternal and child survival will also prevent stillbirth and improve health and developmental outcomes. However, the number of annual stillbirths remains unchanged since 2011 and is unacceptably high: an estimated 2.6 million in 2015.

From evidence to action to deliver a healthy start for the next generation.

Remarkable progress has been made towards halving of maternal deaths and deaths of children aged 1-59 months, although the task is incomplete. Newborn deaths and stillbirths were largely invisible in the Millennium Development Goals, and have continued to fall between maternal and child health efforts, with much slower reduction. This Series and the Every Newborn Action Plan outline mortality goals for newborn babies (ten or fewer per 1000 livebirths) and stillbirths (ten or fewer per 1000 total births) by 2035, aligning with A Promise Renewed target for children and the vision of Every Woman Every Child.

Born too soon: accelerating actions for prevention and care of 15 million newborns born too soon.

Preterm birth complication is the leading cause of neonatal death resulting in over one million deaths each year of the 15 million babies born preterm. To accelerate change, we provide an overview of the comprehensive strategy required, the tools available for context-specifi c health system implementation now, and the priorities for research and innovation. There is an urgent need for action on a dual track: (1) through strategic research to advance the prevention of preterm birth and (2) improved implementation and innovation for care of the premature neonate.

Born too soon: preterm birth matters.

Urgent action is needed to address preterm birth given that the fi rst country-level estimates show that globally 15 million babies are born too soon and rates are increasing in most countries with reliable time trend data. As the fi rst in a supplement entitled “Born Too Soon”, this paper focuses on the global policy context. Preterm birth is critical for progress on Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG) for child survival by 2015 and beyond, and gives added value to maternal health (MDG 5) investments also linking to non-communicable diseases.