Around 1000 health experts from 50 countries gathered in Delhi recently decided to work with governments and other key stakeholders to transform into action the pledges made in the Global Strategy to achieve the millennium development goals four and five.

“We welcome the commitments and outcomes that world leaders agreed to in the Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health launched at the MDG Summit in September 2010; and encourage further commitments to funding fully-costed national plans for achieving MDGs 4 and 5,’’ the declaration at the end of the two-day conclave (November 13, 14) of the Partners forum on women and child health said.

The conference titled “From Pledges to Action – A Partners’ Forum on Women’s and Children’s Health’’ was convened by the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health and hosted by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

“We will act on the emerging consensus on priority, evidence-based interventions, and ensure these are articulated in the form of national plans and implemented equitably at scale through the continuum of care, in order to achieve the agreed results for women's, newborns’ and children's health. We agree to shared principles for advocacy, action and accountability - a core set of indicators, integrated into country monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, so all partners are accountable for the commitments and results agreed to in the Global Strategy,’’ the declaration said.

The conference also called for a multi-stakeholder process to ensure inclusiveness and participation, including the most vulnerable and marginalized. The forum also wanted harmonization of existing efforts to ensure that there is complementarities between partners’ work. The partners also decided to meet again in Delhi in 2015 to evaluate the achievements.

While inaugurating the event, President Pratibha Devisingh Patil called for scaling up of global efforts to improve maternal and child health and achieving of MDGs in this regard. She said “health needs a quality infrastructure but the biggest driver of health is education. Efforts in the direction of improving access to education such as right to education and Sakhar Bharat coupled with improved investment in health will lead to much better results in future”.

Speaking on the occasion the Union Health Minister Shri Ghulam Nabi Azad said that “India has demonstrated its commitment by allocating an outlay of 150 million dollars for the micro plans to address critical gaps of infrastructures, supplies and training-human resources for next year alone. I believe India is the first country to have such costed plan aimed to achieve MDG 4&5.”

In her speech Ms Margaret Chan, director general World Health Organization, stressed the need for credible verifiable data on various health parameters. She said that “for this harmonized monitoring and reporting standards are of critical standards as ‘we must know what we are measuring and where do we stand”. She lauded India’s efforts for bringing down polio cases by 95 per cent and praised the level of political commitment for health related initiative.