This is the ninth in a series of posts from the Ministerial Leadership Initiative's Learning Collaborative Forum in Ethiopia.

One has an army of women. 

Another has a president. A third a first lady, and a fourth "all the marbles in place."

Around a table today at the MLI’s Learning Collaborative Forum in Addis Ababa, four Health Ministry reproductive health directors from Ethiopia, Mali, Senegal, and Sierra Leone had a rare opportunity to talk about successes and challenges in their countries.

Pour lire la version française, voir ci-dessous

In this second of five segments,  John Donnelly interviewed photographer Dominic Chavez about the images below. What follows are his perspectives on his assignment in Senegal, which focused in part on the Ministry of Health’s efforts to reduce maternal mortality:

"Senegal was the first country that we started to document, so it was the introduction to the kind of issues at hand. It was the country where I heard for the first time that almost 350,000 women die around the world every year in child birth. A woman dies almost every minute. So we wanted to witness the difficulties first hand."