Of COVID-19’s many lessons, one is most critical to our collective next steps:

Business as usual in global health is no longer possible.

The pandemic exposed weaknesses in health systems across the world, and particularly in the delivery of equitable, high-quality reproductive, maternal, newborn, adolescent, and child health (RMNCAH) services. It also reinforced that effectively addressing these challenges requires rapid, responsive approaches driven and owned by countries and local institutions.

“The world’s least resilient countries—when faced with ecological stress—are more likely to face civil unrest, political instability, social fragmentation, and economic collapse,” said Cynthia Brady, ECSP Global Fellow and Senior Advisor, at an event hosted by the Alliance for Peacebuilding. These “vulnerabilities are clearly mutually reinforcing, but some of the solutions are mutually reinforcing too,” said Brady. The critical challenge now is to bridge the gap between traditionally siloed communities of practice in conflict prevention and conservation.

In every Chinese city, there is an army of motorcycles and mopeds weaving through the traffic jams, and sometimes even venturing on sidewalks, to deliver millions of food and e-commerce orders each day. Meituan, one of China’s most popular food delivery apps, delivers 30 million orders a day, serving up 100 million plastic containers. According to Greenpeace, e-commerce and express delivery in China generated 9.4 million tons of packaging waste in 2018 and will likely triple to 41.3 million tons by 2025.

Globally, 15 to 20 percent of women experience a perinatal mental health condition, said Sarah Barnes, Project Director of the Maternal Health Initiative at a recent event, held in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), on mental health support for mothers in the perinatal period. Women are more likely to develop anxiety or depression in the year after giving birth than in any other time in their lives, with suicide and overdose the leading causes of death in the first year postpartum. “And yet, the prevention, early recognition, and treatment of perinatal mental health conditions is a challenge for many, if not most, healthcare systems across the world,” said Barnes.

A positive birth experience is not a luxury, but a necessity, said Hedieh Mehrtash, consultant for the Department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research at the World Health Organization (WHO), at a panel during the Maternal Mental Health Technical Consultation hosted by the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership, in collaboration with WHO and the United Nations Population Fund. 

Better access to safe drinking water and sanitation around the world could prevent the deaths of 297,000 children aged under 5 years from diarrhea each year. Likewise, the risk of infection of other common infectious diseases including cholera, hepatitis A, typhoid, and most recently – the coronavirus, can be reduced by improving access to clean water and sanitation facilities.