Rima Jolivet, who joined the Women & Health Initiative in January 2013, is a certified nurse-midwife with a doctorate in public health, specializing in maternal health system strengthening and quality improvement.  She is an expert coalition builder with extensive experience facilitating multi-stakeholder consensus processes to inform maternal health policy, advocacy, and practice.

Since she joined the W&HI, her role has included coordinating the efforts of the WHO-led Ending Preventable Mortality (EPMM) Working Group to develop the global policy paper, Strategies toward Ending Preventable Maternal Mortality, published by WHO in contribution to the post-2015 global development agenda and to the UN Secretary-General’s updated Global Strategy for Every Woman, Child, and Adolescent, and coordinating efforts to develop indicators to track progress toward EPMM targets and objectives. She also directs the MHTF’s portfolio of activities related to Respectful Maternity Care (RMC), including co-chairing a community of practice on Evidence-Informed Approaches to RMC, and leading activities focused on consolidating knowledge and lessons learned to date on measuring the prevalence of mistreatment, disrespect and abuse of women during facility-based childbirth, and documenting the impact of global advocacy to promote RMC.

Before she joined W&HI, as Maternal Health Technical Director for the Health Policy Project on behalf of the White Ribbon Alliance, Rima helped found the Respectful Maternity Care (RMC) Global Council and led the efforts to develop and promote The Respectful Maternity Care Charter: The Universal Rights of Childbearing Women.  Working with Childbirth Connection, she directed the Transforming Maternity Care Project: 2020 Vision for a High Quality, High Value Maternity Care System, and Blueprint for Action, a national policy project that captured the feedback of multiple US stakeholders to present a vision and action plan for health system strengthening and quality improvement within the US maternal health system.  In addition, she has over 15 years of experience providing technical support and strategic direction for implementation and scale-up of an evidence-based model of group prenatal and postpartum care, CenteringPregnancy and CenteringParenting.

Rima holds a BA in French from Columbia College, a BSN from Georgetown University, an MSN in Midwifery from Yale University, and master’s and doctoral degrees in public health from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.  She speaks fluent French and Spanish.

 

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