The United Nations Foundation (UNF) has reaffirmed its commitment to ensuring that women and girls worldwide have access to affordable maternal and reproductive healthcare. The UNF has seen many important commitments during this year's "Women Deliver" conference in Washington to bring innovative ideas to scale to help women and girls. It commended the UN Secretary General, Mr Ban Ki-Moon, for presenting a new Joint Action Plan for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with a strong focus on women and children's health. The action plan agreed that improvement in these areas was one of the best investments the world could make. UNF made its commitment at the just ended world conference on Women Deliver. The second conference was attended by over 3,000 participants from over 140 countries world-wide. Participants included health ministers, women and child health advocates, first ladies, parliamentarians and celebrities. Mr Timothy E. Wirth, President of UNF said it was estimated that between 342,000 to 500,000 women die during pregnancy and child birth each year. To address this, the US government must dedicate one billion dollars to fully fund reproductive health care and integrate family planning into the spectrum of health services that already exist on the ground. He said the UNF had a long standing interest in population issues and women empowerment and "while progress had been made in the past decade around development, more work needed to be done in terms of reducing maternal deaths and providing universal access to family planning". More than 215 million women in developing countries want access to family planning and "we are at a tipping point for making motherhood safe and the need to pool the world's creative ideas and resources together as we are now seeing happen through the use of mobile technology to achieve our global goal". Mr Wirth commended Melinda Gates for leading the way with an investment of 1.5 billion dollars into tangible solutions for improving maternal and child health. He added: "the vital financial resources, coupled with the Gates Foundation's expertise and leadership, will ensure that political commitment translate into real solutions for millions of families across the globe". The UNF is highlighting its new "Girl-Up" campaign aimed at engaging and connecting American teens with girls in the developing world. Through Girl Up's support, girls in developing countries would have the opportunity to become educated, safe, counted and positioned to be the next generation of leaders. The UNF would also be featuring a new global alliance for clean cook stoves as a solution to reduce smoke-related diseases among women and mothers, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. From Linda Asante Agyei, a GNA Special Correspondent in Washington (Courtesy UNFPA, Ghana)