Last week, Rajiv Shah, the USAID Administrator, wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about Saving Lives at Birth, a topic we covered earlier on the blog.
Shah writes:
Grand Challenges are designed to mobilize the world’s brightest thinkers, researchers and entrepreneurs to help break major roadblocks in development. The first in a series of Grand Challenges for USAID, Saving Lives at Birth called for groundbreaking prevention and treatment approaches for pregnant mothers and newborns around the time of birth in rural settings….We know that it is not sufficient to simply develop a single innovation that can save lives. We also have to find ways to deliver these innovations to scale in order have countrywide impact for those in greatest need. If we can achieve this, mothers around the world will be able to deliver safely and newborns will have a healthy start at life.