NEW YORK, Sept. 25 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A consortium of organizations has committed at the fifth annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting to a series of new programs that address Maternal Child Health in the developing world. This group includes Engender Health, the American Indian Foundation, Jhpiego, the Lwala Community Alliance, The Micronutrient Initiative, and One HEART. President Clinton announced their efforts at a CGI plenary session today. Their efforts include:

• Engender Health's Maternal Health Task Force and Ashoka are partnering to form the first international fellowship program that links committed young professionals with seasoned social entrepreneurs to improve maternal health in developing countries. The Young Champions for Maternal Health will spend nine months working with an Ashoka Fellow on a concrete solution addressing a maternal health challenge. EngenderHealth has raised enough funds for 16 fellows, and is seeking resources to expand the program to 32.
• The American Indian Foundation (AIF) plans to bring the corporate, private and public sectors together to alleviate maternal and newborn mortality in the tribal state of Jharkhand in India. AIF is one of the largest secular, non-partisan American organizations supporting development work in India.
• Jhpiego will dedicate $5 million over five years to combat eclampsia -- a high blood pressure disorder -- in 20 countries with the highest maternal mortality rates. Jhpiego's efforts will focus on prevention, detection and treatment of the disorder and will address the challenge of bringing feasible, low-cost and high impact interventions to developing countries. The purpose of Jhpiego's commitment is to ensure developing countries adopt the evidence based interventions that prevent and treat eclampsia to accelerate progress toward reducing maternal deaths.
• The Lwala Community Alliance has committed to expanding its Maternal Child Health programs by building and staffing a maternity facility and scaling its public health programming in the Nyanza Region of Kenya. This bottom up initiative is also supported by CGI members Senator Bill Frist and the Segal Family Foundation. The Lwala Community Alliance is a community based health program in Western Kenya, founded by Kenyan brothers Milton and Fred Ochieng'. The program demonstrates what President Obama promoted recently in Ghana- "Africans solving Africa's problems".
• The Micronutrient Initiative has committed to strengthening their work on maternal health. The Initiative is dedicated to ensuring that the world's most vulnerable - especially women and children - in developing countries get the vitamins and minerals they need to survive.
• One HEART has developed an innovative program, Pregnancy and Village Outreach Training, for outreach into remote and resource-poor communities and has identified two priority sites for implementation, one in the Baglung district of Nepal and the other in Mexico's Copper Canyon -- home to the Tarahumara Indians. One HEART will partner with existing local organizations in these areas, working toward the same commitment but lacking the requisite training, resources, and support. One HEART will work with the partners to provide supplies and skills training on maternal and neonatal health to local populations.
  

These innovative programs will impact different populations around the world and have a similar goal: saving the lives of mothers and their new born children.

For more information about each partner, please visit the following websites: www.lwalacommunityalliance.org, www.micronutrient.org, www.engenderhealth.org, www.aifoundation.org, www.onehearttibet.org, www.jhpiego.org

SOURCE The Lwala Community Alliance