Countdown has a unique role to play in international and national efforts to improve reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health and achieve Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5. It seeks to provide clear and comprehensible data and analysis on key evidence-based interventions, to promote effective action, and to strengthen efforts to hold governments and development partners accountable for fulfilling their commitments to women’s and children’s health. Countdown’s achievements have included:

• Driving consensus around priority interventions and key coverage and outcome indicators for reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH)
• Performing pioneering analyses of equity in coverage of essential health interventions, of policy and health system reforms needed at the country level, and of global financial flows for RMNCH
• Taking on a central accountability role for follow-up to the UN Secretary-General’s Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, by tracking progress on core indicators identified by the Commission for Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health and deepening Countdown engagement at country level
• Partnering with the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) to mobilize and engage Parliamentarians in taking action and demanding accountability for progress on maternal and child health and policy-making at the national level
• Producing reports and country profiles that track progress on key indicators in the high-burden countries that account for more than 95% of maternal, newborn, and child deaths
• Producing a series of articles in The Lancet to disseminate Countdown’s findings to a broad, global medical and scientific audience
• Holding successful Countdown to 2030 international conferences in 2005, 2008, and 2010 that brought together researchers, policy makers, program managers, donors, and advocates from around the world
• Enabling the development of country-level Countdown reports, conferences, and other similar efforts, beginning in Senegal in 2006 and Zambia in 2008
• Successfully advocating for a policy change by UNICEF to support Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) at three- rather than five-year intervals to increase data availability