Over the next three days, thousands of participants will be partaking in the largest global event of the decade to focus on female health and empowerment. Women Deliver 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, will hold more than 120 concurrent sessions from 28^th – 30^th May and will include high level plenaries, skills-building workshops, and ministerial and parliamentarian forums. This event aims to serve as a global platform  for ensuring that the health and rights of females across the world remain top priority now, and for decades to come.

Women Deliver was founded back in 2007 by Jill Sheffield, a global educator and advocate for maternal, reproductive, and sexual health rights.  This global advocacy was created to generate political commitment and financial investment to ultimately reduce maternal mortality and to achieve universal access to reproductive health. There are approximately 287,000 preventable deaths every year that are pregnancy related. The availability to reproductive education (this includes attainable research which emphasises the importance of open access), adequate healthcare, contraception and overall maternal health is not only a basic human right but a practical necessity for sustainable development.

Women Deliver, strives to build a community of partners that are driven to bettering the lives of women and girls worldwide. Working alongside influential policy makers and budget planners from donor countries, Women Deliver aims to increase funding allocations for maternal health and to help bring together sectors including; education, health, development, equity, human rights, poverty reduction, and micro-finance to help fight this cause.

Women Deliver believe that investing in women’s lives will enable maternal deaths to drastically decrease and will allow women and girls to “strive and thrive.” With the basic right of survival there is hope to encourage positivity towards pregnancy and not fear.

For more information please visit the Women Deliver website.

If you are interested in this particular area of research then please visit BioMed Central’s open access journal’s BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, BMC Women’s Health and Reproductive Health.