Every minute of every day a woman dies as a consequence of the most natural of acts: giving birth. The death total is staggering: 530,000 women every year, 95 per cent of them in developing countries. For every death, dozens of women sustain life-altering, and irreversible injuries. A mother’s demise is also a virtual death sentence for any infant she may have. For her children who are under age 5, they have a greater than 50 per cent chance of dying in childhood.

What is shocking is that 80 per cent of these maternal deaths are from five entirely treatable causes: sepsis, hemorrhage, eclampsia, obstructed labour, and septic abortion. This is well known amongst health professionals, yet the international community has been utterly ignoring this global tragedy. It is time to end the indifference.

The place to develop and implement an integrated international plan to reduce maternal deaths and illness is with the G20 leaders, who just met in Pittsburgh. (Canada will host the G8 Summit next year.)

The rationale (beyond the obvious humanitarian reasons) is that a strategic, focused investment in maternal care can decrease health-care costs by $4 and reduce social costs by $30 for every dollar invested in this area. Reducing maternal mortality also has the greatest impact on improving the health of the population as a whole. Why is this so?

To effectively take care of a woman in labour you must have basic surgical capabilities, medications, diagnostics, adequate nutrition, clean water, power, and most importantly, trained health-care workers. With this in place, you can take care of most of the major killers in developing countries – gastroenteritis kills 2.2 million per year, pneumonia 2.1 million, malaria 2 million, HIV/AIDS 2 million. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency for governments, international aid organizations, and NGOs to focus on specific diseases. However, what good are medications if you don’t have a trained health care worker to dispense them appropriately, the proper diagnostic tools to ensure that patients are taking the correct drugs for their conditions, and clean water with which to take their drugs? Investing in specific diseases can actually harm the overall health of a population by draining resources from the primary care system rather than strengthening the structure that is needed to respond to most health problems.

Last July, parliamentarians from around the world met in Rome at a pre-G8 conference on health. They developed a plan of action to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity and gave it to the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations.

The document asks for investments to: train and pay primary health-care workers; provide access to a full range of contraceptive options, affordable drugs and diagnostics; provide for adequate nutrition, especially micronutrients. (More than 100,000 pregnant women die every year because they have iron deficiency anemia. It would take mere pennies to save their lives.)

Effective capacity-building can be accomplished by universities in the West partnering with institutions in the developing world. In this way, professional/technical capabilities in the developed world can be used to create domestic capabilities in low-income countries. For example, a medical school could develop a relationship with the only tertiary care hospital in the Eastern Congo (the HEAL Africa Hospital), and NGOs like Engineers Without Borders could be brought in to address the region’s clean water and sanitation needs.

The G20 leaders who met in Pittsburgh were given a plan of action to address this crisis in July. Groups such as those attending the WE Summit next week in Toronto should make it loud and clear that the world’s leaders need to focus on improving maternal health. This is crucial to improving the lives of the world’s poorest people.