The eighth meeting of the Strategic and Technical Advisory Group of Experts (STAGE) for maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and nutrition (MNCAHN) was held in Geneva on 14–16 November 2023. Most of the STAGE members attended in person while five attended the meeting online. They were joined by WHO staff at headquarters and online from regional offices, and 50 observers from partner organizations. The meeting agenda included three new topics (maternal well-being, birth defects and complementary feeding) and detailed updates on various topics from the previous meetings (maternal newborn stillbirth transition framework, maternal and newborn health (MNH) commodities, midwifery models of care, caregiver practices as part of child and adolescent health well-being, and kangaroo mother care (KMC)). The preparatory work included meetings either with existing working groups of STAGE or with small subgroups with the co-chairs of the two workstreams and select STAGE members. These groups provided inputs to the WHO technical teams for the preparation of background information and for the presentations to STAGE. The open sessions on each day enabled inputs from STAGE members, WHO regional offices and observers from various organizations, while the closed sessions with STAGE members helped consolidate the STAGE recommendations. These were further finetuned through online consultations with the members and the final STAGE recommendations are provided in this report.

The STAGE meeting report provides a summary of the deliberations at the STAGE meeting and includes the STAGE recommendations to WHO.

Having a child remains one of the biggest health risks for women worldwide. Fifteen hundred women die every day while giving birth. That's a half a million mothers every year. UNICEF's flagship publication, The State of the World's Children 2009, addresses maternal mortality, one of the most intractable problems for development work.The difference in pregnancy risk between women in developing countries and their peers in the industrialised world is often termed the greatest health divide in the world. A woman in Niger has a one in seven chance of dying during the course of her lifetime from complications during pregnancy or delivery. That's in stark contrast to the risk for mothers in America, where it's one in 4,800 or in Ireland, where it's just one in 48,000. Addressing that gap is a multidisciplinary challenge, requiring an emphasis on education, human resources, community involvement and social equality. At a minimum, women must be guaranteed antenatal care, skilled birth attendants and emergency obstetrics, and postpartum care. These essential interventions will only be guaranteed within the context of improved education and the abolition of discrimination.