Morning Briefing

"Just two years ago, our country had one of the worst maternal and infant death rates in the world," Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma writes in a Huffington Post U.K. "Impact" blog post, adding, "We knew something had to be done." So in September 2009, the government announced "that all health user fees would be removed for pregnant and lactating women and children under the age of five" and "introduced the Free Health Care Initiative [FHCI] in April 2010, which would give around 460,000 women and a million children a much better chance of having a longer and happier life," Koroma writes. In one year, the FHCI facilitated a "214 percent increase in the number of children attending outpatient units" and a 61 percent reduction in "the number of women dying from pregnancy complications at facilities," and "increased the number of health workers and ensured they were given big salary rises to reflect the importance of their positions," he notes.