**Pictured above: Aden Duale, Cabinet Secretary for Health in Kenya. Photo credit: IMNHC
By Susannah Hurd, Chief Strategy Officer
The International Maternal and Newborn Health Conference (IMNHC) convened in Nairobi last week, bringing together practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and advocates around a shared and urgent mission: accelerating progress on maternal and newborn health. IMNHC 2026 delivered real moments of ambition — and revealed, with equal clarity, where our collective work still falls short. Kinaura participated across the full week as conveners, facilitators, and strategic partners.
Has the Midwifery Moment Finally Arrived?
If you know me, you know that I am a supporter of midwives, not only from my personal experience as a mom of two kids, but also from my professional work in women’s health and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), with clear data on the immense difference that midwives can make. Midwives can provide nearly 90% of all essential sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, and adolescent health services.
Midwifery models of care could prevent two-thirds of maternal and newborn deaths and stillbirths — and deliver a 16-fold return on every dollar invested, the highest ROI in global health. And yet the world is still short one million midwives.
Our team was genuinely heartened to see midwives centered at IMNHC 2026 — from the Midwifery Accelerator Symposium hosted by UNFPA, ICM, WHO, and Jhpiego, to the country showcase, to plenary speakers and sessions throughout the week. It was clear that the conversation has shifted: midwifery is no longer a footnote in MNH strategy. It is a core driver of progress and better health outcomes.
This shift matters because it reflects a deeper understanding of quality of care. Midwives provide nutrition counseling, family planning, mental health support, disease prevention, and community-based continuity across the full reproductive health continuum. In humanitarian and climate-affected settings — where over 50% of preventable maternal deaths now occur — given their strong link to communities, midwives are often first responders, sustaining care when formal health systems collapse. They are the critical link for many women for survival in some cases. Midwives place women and gender-diverse people at the center, delivering care through trusted relationships with individuals and communities while providing essential, culturally appropriate, and gender-sensitive services—including support for survivors of gender-based violence. As community-embedded providers, they are especially critical for reaching populations that face systemic barriers to care, including adolescents, Indigenous communities, migrants and displaced persons, and ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender minorities.
At our own Prevention at the Center event, co-hosted with the Gates Foundation, Eleanor Crook Foundation, MSD for Mothers, and the International Confederation of Midwives, we heard directly from practitioners on the frontlines making the case for comprehensive, preventive maternal care — from quality antenatal services and skilled birth attendance to prophylactic medicines, family planning, nutrition, and postpartum follow-up. Midwives are central to delivering that prevention at scale. A live illustrator captured these key themes in real time (pictured above). This is all evidenced in the “Unlocking Impact Evidence Brief”, which Kinaura was proud to partner with the PUSH Campaign and ICM on, and which makes the cross-sectoral case for midwives as a strategic investment in economic growth, health equity, gender equality, and climate and crisis resilience.
This is a key part of our work at Kinaura Partners – collaborating with partners that are expanding access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare, while advancing women’s rights and autonomy.
Government Leadership: Yes! And…
A strong through-line at IMNHC 2026 was government ownership — the “One Plan, One Budget, One Report” framework was championed by donors, the GFF, EWENE, and country partners. This is the right architecture. Sustainable progress in MNH cannot rest only on donor-driven strategies.
But a critical question remains unanswered, under-implemented, or under-prioritized: what is the role of civil society?
The answer is not to diminish government leadership — it’s to insist that the process by which governments design national plans must be genuinely participatory. Civil society brings community voice, technical expertise, implementation capacity, and accountability that no government or donor can replicate alone. The private sector matters here too: in many countries, private providers deliver the majority of health services and drive critical innovation.
The most honest moment of the week came from a representative of the Malawi Ministry of Health who shared that their national plan had advanced significantly before the team realized they hadn’t adequately involved civil society. They paused and brought them in. The result, they reported, was a better plan. That story should be a standing lesson, not an exception.
The Gap We Can’t Ignore: SRHR
There is no complete story of IMNHC 2026 without naming what was underrepresented: sexual and reproductive health and rights.
We cannot reduce maternal mortality without addressing the full continuum of reproductive health. The evidence is robust: unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, and lack of access to contraception are direct drivers of maternal death. We know this — but there was too little conversations on SRHR.
I appreciated sessions like the one hosted by the Gates Institute and FP2030: Stronger Together for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, which brought together partners to align shared priorities and asks across global moments that all address SRHR, MNCH, and gender equality in different ways: ICFP, IMNHC, FIGO, ICM’s Triennial Congress, Women Deliver, the World Sexual Health Summit and more. While each global moment plays a unique role, if we are not connecting across them, then we miss the mark.
And, we have to acknowledge political, financial, and social pressures that SRHR providers and advocates are navigating in real time. This is the same pressure that Kinaura’s evening session this week examined directly: the growing anti-rights movement is a coordinated, well-funded movement, that explicitly targets the language, frameworks, and policies that link reproductive rights to maternal health. In our current environment, the voices of the MNH community in support of SRHR are needed more than ever. At our evening event MNH at a Turning Point — co-hosted with Comotion, Center for Reproductive Rights, Libera, and FP2030 — feminist leaders from Latin America, East and Southern Africa, and the U.S. made the case plainly: the MNH community cannot treat reproductive rights as someone else’s fight. Grassroots movements and multi-sector, multi-stakeholder collaboration is key; we must bring together champions from civil society, government, donors, religious and cultural leaders, and more to ensure evidence-based solutions are prioritized and rights are protected.
What Kinaura Is Carrying Forward
IMNHC 2026 confirmed the strategic terrain we work in every day: technical rigor and political courage, global frameworks and community realities, government leadership and civil society power. The momentum is real. But momentum without structural change — in financing, in policy, in who is at the table — is not enough. It is time to move from commitments to results. That work continues.
Add your voice to the PUSH Campaign’s petition calling for One Million More Midwives and check out these PATH-partnered briefs, which highlight how, amid declining global health funding, bold political will, strengthened civil society advocacy, and coordinated leadership are critical to overcome persistent bottlenecks and accelerate progress for maternal, newborn, and child health across Sub-Saharan Africa and in Zambia, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania.
Also, learn more about the growing anti-rights movement in our analysis.
