Harper Heads to Geneva to Co-Chair Maternal Health Panel

The United Nations Commission on Information and Accountability for Women's and Children's Health oversees $40 billion in international pledges.

Stephen Harper knows more about how to save money than how to save lives, and so it’s his economics skills that he’s offered to aid UN efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality by 75 per cent. The panel he’s co-chairing Tuesday in Switzerland is tasked with ensuring that international donations going towards maternal and child health is spent wisely, and his first day on the job will mainly be consumed with determining how to measure progress on the ground. The accountability panel convenes just days after it was revealed that a major non-UN development agency is rife with corruption. An internal audit found that in some cases the Global Fund had two-thirds of its grant money siphoned off.