What Next?

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By: Zubaida Bai, Young Champion of Maternal Health

This blog post was contributed by Zubaida Bai, one of the fifteen Young Champions of Maternal Health chosen by Ashoka and the Maternal Health Task Force at EngenderHealth. She will be blogging about her experience every month, and you can learn more about her, the other Young Champions, and the program here.

Just another month….Loads of applications, presentations, more presentations and great meetings. Time is cruising through. It definitely is a time of “What Next?” for AYZH but with MORE confidence than ever before. What I have today is a well-informed confidence that AYZH will be a sustainable Social Venture. I am no longer thinking about how I am going to sustain AYZH but rather about how I am going to take this company Global to prevent the loss of millions of lives that can be saved by a simple intervention. I am not mission driven any more; I am SALES driven (as crazy as it may sound). It is a very good drive. The more sales, the more lives we impact and the more women and children we save. The more sales, the stronger our vision gets helping us join the march in achieving MDG 5.

Though it was just another month, we young champions are now six months into this fellowship and now we have arrived at a pivotal time where all of us and the entire team of Ashoka and Maternal Health Task Force are thinking “What Next?” I bet each of the young champions have ideas swarming around which definitely need refinement. Questions on funding, business plan development, team building which all lead towards improving the maternal health scenario. I am eagerly waiting for the conference in Ghana and to listen to all the entrepreneurial and intrepreneurial ideas and to discuss “What Next?” with a team which is being assembled to support all of us.