Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, when his Department plans to publish its action plan on ending preventable deaths.

We plan to launch the Ending Preventable Deaths Action Plan this year, but exact dates have yet to be finalised. Ending the preventable deaths of mothers, newborn and children requires work across sectors to address the complex pathways leading to mortality. This includes provision of family planning, maternal and neonatal health, immunisation, nutrition, water and sanitation and health systems strengthening work.

The FCDO funds a range of mechanisms that support ending preventable deaths, such as the Global Financing Facility, Reproductive Health Supplies and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, as well as work at the country level through our bilateral programmes. Additional funding will be determined after the Spending Review. FCDO spend is calculated using OECD-DAC sector codes, details of which are available in the Statistics on International Development publication and DevTracker. We do not calculate spend on ending preventable deaths interventions in their totality. Broad donor Reproductive Maternal Newborn and Child Health (RMNCH) spend is calculated by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) using the internationally recognised Muskoka2 methodology, found here: https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/6/e006089.full