Giving Compass' Take:

• Mariam Claeson explains why the Global Financing Facility focuses their global development funding on gender equality and health and nutrition for women and children. 

• Is the best approach to global development? How can funders make an impact on these areas? 

• Find out why nutrition funding needs a paradigm shift. 

Every six seconds, a woman, child, or adolescent dies from a cause that we can prevent — during pregnancy or labor, or during newborn, early childhood, or adolescent life stages.

These millions of lives lost serve as are a shocking reminder that gender inequalities remain worldwide.

But we can put an end to these preventable deaths by approaching development in a way that prioritizes health, nutrution, and gender equality together — if we work to ensure that she is equal.

The Global Financing Facility (GFF) was launched in 2015, at a time when just over 10% of all low- or middle-income countries (15 out of 134) achieved Millennium Development Goal 5 to reduce maternal mortality.

The GFF takes a holistic, sustainable approach to development, and we know that improving gender equality and improving health are inseparable. Chronic, systemic underinvestment in areas like quality maternal and newborn care, comprehensive sexual and reproductive health including family planning, and nutrition remains a huge barrier to progress.

For many countries, funding is predominantly invested in primary and community health systems, as well as programs that increase access to contraceptives, emergency obstetric and newborn services, exclusive breastfeeding promotion, and cervical cancer screening and treatment.

Read the full article about development priorities by Mariam Claeson at Global Citizen.