Irrespective of the circumstances of her birth, the most powerful decision-maker in a baby’s life is not a doctor, a teacher, a government official or a religious figure, but her mother.

As powerful as these traditional authorities may be, it is a mother who decides whether or not to continue with a pregnancy, how to nourish herself and her child, when to respond if a child is sick and how to nurture child development in the early years.

When mothers have the right knowledge and tools to exercise their power, babies can thrive.  However, when mothers are restricted in any way – by lack of education, limited financial clout, no agency in the household, discriminatory legal restrictions or lack of access to services – their own health and their baby’s health can be at grave risk.

Seen in this light, many of our major development challenges, from reducing deaths in pregnancy and childbirth to ending newborn mortality and child malnutrition, are actually outcomes of mothers lacking the instruments to exercise their own power.

With just a few tools – a high school education, a paid job, access to contraception, decision-making power in the household and outside help when needed – mothers could prevent most of the deaths that occur in pregnancy, childbirth and childhood.

How?

If all mothers were free to make the following ten decisions, most of the negative events that sustain the high rates of poverty, inequality, sickness and death in too many parts of the world could be prevented.

The 10 Decisions Every Mother Needs to be Free to Make

EARNING AN INCOME

If every mother earned and controlled her own money, almost every measure of human development would improve, including economic growth, poverty and inequality, health and education, and, in the long-run, even peace and security. Yet the proportion of women who are employed globally has remained stuck at around 50 percent since 2000, and there are an estimated 1.4 billion unemployed women in the world today, most of whom are mothers (World Bank).

USING CONTRACEPTION

If every woman could control if, when and how many children she had, she could simultaneously improve her own health, education and employment and invest more in her children.  For example, if all women who wanted to use contraception could do so, deaths in pregnancy and childbirth and newborn deaths would fall by a massive 60 percent. Yet currently 225 million married or partnered women and an estimated 570 million single women have an unmet need for modern contraception (Guttmacher Institute). Further, 290,000 women still die in pregnancy and childbirth every year and 2.7 million babies die in the first month of life (UNFPA and UNICEF).

LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE

The more educated a mother the more likely her children are to survive and thrive.  An astonishing half of the reduction in child deaths in recent decades is the result of increases in the education of women of reproductive age (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation), yet women still make up 64 percent of the world’s 780 million illiterate adults.  Shockingly, in twelve countries more than 60 percent of adult women are illiterate, including Niger, Guinea, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Benin, Afghanistan, Mali, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia (UNESCO).