Meg Wirth developed Maternova, a global marketplace for ideas and tools saving maternal/newborn lives

Meg Wirth

Meg Wirth is the founder of Maternova and a S.E.VEN fellow. She has worked on women's health throughout her career in areas as diverse as starting a home visiting program for teen mothers in Appalachia to monitoring and evaluating a major Safe Motherhood initiative--funded by USAID and implemented by John Snow International's Mothercare project-- in Jakarta and South Kalimantan, Indonesia. Meg has also worked as a member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Health Equity team and co-edited a major volume called Challenging Inequities in Health: From Ethics to Action. She was a co-author of the UN Millennium Project’s final report on child and maternal health. An innovator at heart, over the last several years she co-developed the strategy for the first global health social venture capital fund with a focus on women's health in low-income countries. She has a BA from Harvard University and an MPA in international development from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.

About the project

Maternova works with the frontline health worker and all organizations, policymakers, and individuals who support her. In their fight to save women’s lives, health workers are in desperate need of information, tools, skills, and peer connection. To maximize resources and empower their efforts, Maternova is building a portal for innovation in global maternal and neonatal health.

Our aim is the creation of a go-to site for connection, technology, and cutting-edge thought in global maternal health. The field has already welcomed medical, public health, design, and business professionals, but new groups-- industrial designers, entrepreneurs, engineers-- are increasingly interested in the power of simple innovations to change lives. Maternova seeks to build on these seismic changes, to amplify their positive effect on women and their families.

Maternova

Maternova is about moving maternal and newborn care into the 21st century.

Three very basic questions guide our work.

• What effective, low-cost tools (in development or on the market) can save mothers' and newborns' lives in low-resource settings?
• How and where should global health innovators direct their efforts?
• In low-resource areas, where do the facilities exist that can provide women with skilled care?

Three goals core to our mission derive from these three questions:

• track innovations
• connect professionals
• map maternal health facilities