Women, children, and adolescents in the post-pandemic world

By Helga Fogstad, Executive Director, PMNCH

19 April 2021
Media release
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Mahomed Patel and Christine Phillips1 offer compelling arguments for a post-COVID-19 world that breaks with business as usual. I wholeheartedly agree. An early study2 of the indirect impact of COVID-19 on maternal and child mortality estimated 2 million additional deaths in 2020–21 compared with pre-pandemic figures because of the disruptions to essential health services.

The world after the pandemic offers a unique opportunity for radical change by placing women, children, and adolescents at the heart of investments in health and opportunities for socioeconomic repair and resilience.

New solutions can be discovered to advance health—eg, by challenging the dominance of biomedical and technical frameworks that detract from the effect of power relations on health outcomes. We also need a global investment framework that includes women, children, and adolescents at its core, and features components on preparedness and response.

To ensure that the experiences of women and young people drive policy and research in this area, the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) issued a seven-point call to action in 2020, to direct investment and policy towards the unequal social, economic, and political factors driving the impact of COVID-19 and its future consequences. Commitments by ten countries to women’s, children’s, and adolescents’ health—totalling US$20 billion—will be amplified by the PMNCH as part of this call.

I urge the global health community to support Patel and Phillips’ call for a moral imagination that makes us think about how we frame solutions to old and new problems. We are morally obliged to heed that call.

1 Patel MS, Phillips CB. COVID-19 and the moral imagination. Lancet 2021; 397: 648–50.

2 Roberton T, Carter ED, Chou VB, et al. Early estimates of the indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on maternal and child mortality in low-income and middle-income countries: a modelling study. Lancet Glob Health 2020; 8: e901–08.

This piece was originally published on The Lancet.