September marked a milestone moment for Every Pregnancy. We spent a week at UNGA 80 in New York, meeting partners, building relationships, and co-hosting our first global event with Axmed, at Goals House. This brought together donors, implementers, and maternal health champions for the kind of disruptive conversation traditional forums avoid.

The week was intense, inspiring, and confirmed that now, more than ever, there is a need and opportunity to radically rethink existing approaches to fund, collaborate and deliver interventions to mothers and newborns that need this most.

What needs to happen differently

Our partners operate in over 20 countries, from Gaza to Pakistan, from Mali to Tanzania, and they've shown us what's truly possible when lead and resources follow.

In Pakistan, despite devastating floods and extreme heat, midwives and birthing assistants are driving maternal mortality lower through their own interventions. In clinics where temperatures reach 100 degrees daily, with no air conditioning, no fans, and 200 women waiting nine hours to see a doctor, healthcare workers bring their own fans to comfort laboring mothers. Doctors advocate for solar panels and work to maintain sanitation despite limited resources.

They're not waiting for big funders to trickle funds down to them, but taking matters into their own hands as local actors know exactly what works for the contexts in which they operate.

We have the solutions, they're just not reaching those who need them most.

Our Call to Action: Five Ways to Disrupt Traditional Funding

To reimagine, rethink, and reinforce how maternal and newborn health is funded, we must:

1. Prioritize and Resource Local Organizations

Resource local organizations with deep community trust and knowledge to provide care to mothers during each stage of pregnancy. Let’s stop parachuting in with band-aid solutions. Local actors understand their contexts and deserve sustained investment, not just temporary fixes.

2. Form Collaborative Funding Partnerships

Donor partnerships across institutional philanthropy, public giving, private funding, and faith-based funders, are essential to reduce fragmentation, leverage complementary strengths, build trust, and channel more funds to interventions that save the most lives. The power of zakat and faith-inspired giving can transform maternal health when properly harnessed.

3. Invest in Ecosystem Efficiencies

Support innovations and systems that ensure a greater share of every dollar reaches life-saving interventions with the highest impact. Every dollar invested in maternal and newborn health yields $9 in economic and social gains. When you save a mother's life, you save a family's life, a community's life, and everybody prospers.

4. Align with Government Priorities with Transparency

Donors must align with national and sub-national strategies, and be transparent and accountable to governments, so that governments can plan, coordinate, and sustain long-term maternal and newborn health responses.

5. Enable Flexible Funding in Crises

With more mothers at the fault lines of conflict, climate, and displacement, funding must allow rapid response and adaptation when emergencies strike. Rigid funding structures cost lives when disasters hit.

From Inspiration to Action

Conversations at UNGA showed us that the solutions for reducing maternal and newborn mortality already exist. What we need is to reimagine and enforce mechanisms so that these solutions reach mothers that need this most. 

One of the things that is missing is a funding system that recognises and trusts the power already at work in these communities. One that shifts from charity to collaboration, from control to partnership, and from fragmented aid to a unified movement that prioritizes locally led solutions to save mothers’ and babies’ lives.  

We are excited for the role that faith can play in this new maternal health landscape, not as a peripheral voice, but as a driving force that mobilises generosity, trust, and collective action. Faith has the power to connect hearts across borders, inspire giving that sustains rather than reacts, and unite communities around one shared goal: making every pregnancy safe.

If you share this vision, we invite you to connect with us and explore how we can partner to reimagine maternal health, together.