Women have the right to contraception and now thanks to a new initiative more than 27 million women in the world's poorest nations will have access to the implant.
Health on Female First
The initiative is a joint effort of the Government of Norway and other partners, including the British and US governments and the Clinton Health Access Initiative, as well as Bayer HealthCare, the manufacturer of the implant.
“Innovation is the key to our commercial success and at the same time the basis of our social commitment,” said Dr. Jörg Reinhardt, Chief Executive Officer of Bayer HealthCare AG.
At present, more than 200 million women in developing countries who do not want to get pregnant have no access to modern contraception and family planning services. As a leading company in the field of hormonal contraception, Bayer HealthCare has been working in a network of public and private partners for over 50 years and supports family-planning programs in over 130 countries.
This latest initiative is a further step ahead in this direction. When fully implemented, the new partnership is expected to avert almost 30 million unwanted pregnancies from 2013 to 2019 and will save an estimated 250 million USD in global health costs.
It will also help to avert more than 280,000 child and 30,000 maternal deaths.
For Bayer HealthCare, this initiative is part of its “Access to Medicine” strategy, where the company is cooperating with a number of private and state organizations. Through its “Family Planning” and “Neglected Diseases” lighthouse projects, the company is enabling access to health care. The “Family Planning” lighthouse projects also address three of the eight Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations: strengthening equal opportunities, reducing child mortality and improving health care for mothers.
Tagged in Women's Health