What Every Pregnancy’s UNGA81 panel revealed about why proven maternal health solutions still fail to reach mothers
The drape that can reveal dangerous blood loss after childbirth costs about fifty cents. But it saves no one sitting in a storeroom.
More than 700 maternal deaths occur every day from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. The latest UN inter-agency estimates put the toll at roughly 260,000 in 2023, and the World Health Organization reports that most maternal deaths are preventable.
In many cases, the problem is not the absence of a proven solution. It is what happens between evidence and care. A solution may exist, work, and even reach a country, yet still fail to benefit the mother it was designed to serve.
Isra Chaker, Founder and CEO of Every Pregnancy, described that journey as a pipeline. A proven intervention has to be produced affordably, approved, incorporated into health policy, procured, moved through supply chains, placed in the hands of a trained health worker, and ultimately made accessible to the mother who needs it. A break at any stage can prevent that intervention from becoming care. Closing the gap therefore requires more than innovation. It requires every stage of the pipeline to work together.
That disconnect was the problem Every Pregnancy brought to the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA81) in New York.
At Goals House, Every Pregnancy coalition partners convened approximately 100 participants from government, philanthropy, industry, and frontline organizations for the panel “From Pipeline to Pregnancy: Unlocking the Final Step.” The speakers each held responsibility for a different stage of the pipeline: Mazen Mokhtar, CEO of Baitulmaal; Dr. Zaher Sahloul, CEO and Co-Founder of MedGlobal; Matthew Rielly, Ventures Business Leader at Philips; Hon. Dr. Adanna Steinacker, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Women’s Health, Federal Republic of Nigeria; and Dr. Rasa Izadnegahdar, Director, Maternal, Newborn, Child Nutrition & Health at the Gates Foundation.
Their discussion began with a measure of success, then surfaced four lessons that follow an intervention along the pipeline: how it is designed, how health workers learn to use it, whether the system around it can respond, and whether mothers trust the care it makes possible.
The measure: Did the mother benefit?
Every stage of the pipeline has its own markers of progress: a product developed, purchased, shipped, or delivered. The panel began by establishing that none of these is what counts. The real question is whether care changed for the mother the product was meant to serve.
Mokhtar illustrated that distinction with a storeroom in Wajir, northeastern Kenya, filled with postpartum hemorrhage drapes used to measure blood loss after birth. He called the drape “a wonderful fifty-cent piece of technology that can save lives.”
The drapes had been procured and delivered. Health workers, however, had never been trained to use them.
“The central question should be: Did the mother benefit?” Mokhtar said.
On paper, the delivery counted as progress. For the mothers it was meant to protect, the drapes might as well never have arrived.
Lesson 1: Design with the people who will use the solution
Whether a mother benefits is often decided long before a product reaches her country, at the design stage.
Rielly described how early engagement with nurses and health centers in Kenya and India revealed that many facilities lacked reliable internet access. That input allowed his team at Philips to rethink how its tool could operate on low-cost devices without depending on connectivity.
Innovators’ missteps, Rielly said, “usually revolve around not including insights from end users at the very, very beginning.”
Consulting the frontline early is, in effect, asking Mokhtar’s question before a product is built rather than after it has shipped.
Lesson 2: Make training part of delivery
The Wajir drapes did not fail at design. They failed at the stage that followed, because no one had been taught to use them. The panel’s second lesson was that training is part of delivery itself, not something that comes after it.
After the war in Syria began in 2011, Syrian-American physicians trained Syrian doctors in portable ultrasound. Those doctors trained others. Within a year, Sahloul saw a Syrian surgeon using the technology in an underground hospital in Aleppo.
“This is how you adopt technology and how you train trainers,” Sahloul said. “It’s not easy.”
MedGlobal has continued this approach by combining portable ultrasound training with ongoing mentorship in fragile and humanitarian settings, recognizing that adoption takes time, reinforcement, and people who can carry knowledge forward.
Lesson 3: Fund the system around the solution
A trained health worker with the right tool can identify a dangerous complication. What happens next depends on the system around the mother. A mother still needs a functioning facility, trained staff, reliable supplies, transportation, and a referral pathway that works.
“The ultimate innovator’s blind spot is really thinking that the last mile is that technology that arrives in the warehouse of a country,” Steinacker said.
Without a pathway to treatment, she warned, it can become “just a device that tells a woman how she’s going to die.”
Steinacker urged funders to invest in “the things that are not shiny,” including logistics, data systems, and workforce training.
Lesson 4: Treat trust as part of the infrastructure
All of that work leads to a decision that belongs to the mother herself: whether to seek care at all. Access is not only physical; it is also relational.
As Chaker noted, locally rooted, community-based organizations bring something that funding and technology cannot quickly create: “presence, relationships, contextual knowledge and trust.”
That kind of trust takes years to build. It is also why locally rooted organizations belong at the start of the pipeline, not only at its end.
What the four lessons add up to
Taken together, the lessons point to one conclusion: proven interventions often fail not because the technology is wrong, but because the stages around it remain disconnected. Design without frontline input, delivery without training, diagnosis without referral, and services without trust can each stop a proven intervention before it benefits a mother.
The contrast is clearest in Nigeria, where the same kind of drape that sat unused in Wajir became part of a broader effort to train midwives and scale treatment for postpartum hemorrhage. Izadnegahdar described how Professor Hadiza Galadanci led that effort, helping train thousands of midwives. Her leadership showed what one champion can unlock, but sustainable impact at scale cannot depend on individual champions alone. The system around successful solutions must change as well.
“We have built many of the individual pieces of the pipeline,” Chaker said. “The challenge now is connecting them.”
Taking the lessons beyond UNGA81
No single actor can close these gaps alone. The wider Every Pregnancy community also has a role: sustaining attention, mobilizing resources, and helping proven solutions reach the communities where the pipeline is most likely to break.
Izadnegahdar pointed to this when he described the Every Pregnancy platform as distinctive because “it taps into resources that can be mobilized and puts them towards community organizations that are doing this work on the ground.” To carry that work forward, Every Pregnancy announced the Pipeline to Pregnancy Committee, intended to connect experts and organizations across the pipeline to identify and overcome barriers together.
The goal is clear: every mother should receive the care she needs, when she needs it, and have the chance to go home safely with her baby.