Jill Sheffield

2006 Finalist – Social Category
Age: 65
Hometown: New York, NY

Jill Sheffield founded Family Care International (FIC), (www.familycareintl.org), after moving to Kenya with her husband and witnessing the desperate need for proper healthcare services for preganant women. Although her primary purpose was to save women’s lives during pregnancy and childbirth, FIC has grown to ensure that women and adolescents have access to life-saving services and information to improve their health, experience save pregnancy and child-birth, and avoid unwanted pregnancy and HIV. Over the past 20 years, Sheffield and FCI have been a guiding force behind the safe motherhood movement, bringing the neglected issue of maternal health to the international fore, pushing for increased investment in maternal health globally, and leading the way toward identifying and creating new practices for reducing maternal deaths worldwide. They have trained more than 300 maternity care providers in essential obstetric care, installed solar panels in close to 50 facilities that had previously lacked a source of electricity, and addressed critical infrastructure and equipment gaps in nearly 100 health facilities, with an approximate 200-250 percent increase in skilled care utilization overall in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.