The December issue of National Geographic has a great piece on maternal and child health in the central part of India’s Maharashtra state. The author, Tina Rosenberg, focuses on the Jamkhed program that trains local midwives to administer health services and deliver babies safely. The success has been dramatic: Thirty-eight years after its founding, the program has trained health workers in 300 villages. Among those that have been in the program for more than a few years, the traditional scourges—childhood diarrhea, pneumonia, neonatal deaths, malaria, leprosy, maternal tetanus, tuberculosis—have virtually vanished. In rural Maharashtra, 56 percent of births are attended by a health worker, compared with 99 percent in Jamkhed villages. To read more, click here. Then, check out the photo gallery and a video about the challenge of providing health care to rural areas.