Earlier this year Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Yemen where she reunited with Nujood Ali, the first child bride in the country to get a divorce. Pictured here is also Shada Nasser, Nujood's attorney.
In late July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the stage to speak at “Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development.” A joint effort of USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Government of Norway, Grand Challenges Canada, and the World Bank, the event called on the brightest researchers around the world to identify and scale up transformative prevention and treatment approaches for pregnant women and newborns in rural, low-resource settings around the time of birth.
Clinton relayed how great the opportunity was to internationalize efforts and bring change through innovation. “We want to do development more effectively. That is our goal. We want to change systems. We want to deliver highest possible impact for every tax payer dollar we spend,” she said.
According to Clinton, few challenges are as persistent or heartbreaking as the health of women and children. She cited WHO’s calculation that 2.6 million children are stillborn a year and that a woman living in Sub-Saharan Africa is 136 times more likely to die at childbirth than women elsewhere in the world.
