Finalists

Most women in rural Mali give birth at home and with limited assistance, due to unmanageable distances between communities and health facilities, unsupported community health workers and the inability of the health system to track pregnant women and respond to high risk and emergency cases. As a result, Mali has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.

This 24 month project integrates innovative uses of technology with women’s on-the-doorstep personalized pregnancy diagnostic services and raises awareness of the need to obtain antenatal care, particularly in remote and nomad Kuchi populations, in Herat Province, Afghanistan. The project is staffed by women doctors, midwives and community health workers (CHWs) who work together across traditional boundaries to save women’s lives in pregnancy and childbirth.

China is a lower-middle income country, with a population of 1.34 billion. Among this enormous population, there is dramatic disparity of maternal and neonatal health, with the rate of preterm low birth weight (PLBW) ranging from 5~6% in the developed metropolises to >20% in the poor rural areas. One possible reason for the high PLBW rate is poor maternal oral health, which adversely impacts the birth outcome.

Containers 2 Clinics (C2C), in partnership with The Synergos Institute and the Namibia Ministry of Health and Social Services (NMoHSS) will pilot a regional cluster of three state-of-the-art shipping container healthcare clinics, and provide comprehensive services, including clinical, lab, pharmacy and programming for women and children. The partnership will create access to high-quality primary healthcare and provide the NMoHSS a replicable, scalable solution for building national capacity in maternal and child health.

This consortium will test a set of empowerment innovations for pregnant women through Safe Motherhood Solidarity Groups on Idjwi Island in Democratic Republic of Congo focusing on three strategic interventions: 1) Providing women with financial autonomy through the creation of community insurance programs that will enable access to all needed services for mothers and newborns in health centers, 2) enabling communities to actively design feasible, home-based maternal and neonatal assessment tools to monitor outcomes through the implementation of a participatory communication model, and 3) tr

In this decade, reproductive health voucher programs have successfully reduced maternal and infant mortality and morbidity through the innovative financing of reproductive health services.

Medical doctors and registered nurses who work with birthing mothers in rural, developing countries have had their hands tied for too long; they need better monitoring equipment and the education to use that equipment to generate data that will allow them to more effectively treat expectant mothers. The Bolivia Delivers project proposes to develop a low cost, portable maternal and fetal monitoring system that will allow rural practitioners to make decisions based on trends that occur over time in their patients’ physiological data.

A major gap exists between what is known – the evidence base for effective maternal and neonatal health (MNH) – and what is practiced, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Interventions that can effectively close this gap in these settings depend on community engagement, reliable health systems, and effective leadership. Over the past four years, the Malawian NGO, MaiKhanda, has tested ways to improve health system effectiveness for MNH.

Deaths from PPH, eclampsia, infection and obstructed labour are the major obstacles in achieving MDG5; and infection, birth asphyxia and low-birth weight are for MDG4 in resource poor countries in Asia and Africa. These deaths are preventable, but, treatments along with functional health system are not always available and accessible in these countries. However, low-cost evidence-based solutions implementable at community level are available to prevent mortality from these causes.

Each year in sub-Saharan Africa 880,000 babies are stillborn and 1 million die in the first week of life. Many of these deaths are due to maternal infection with HIV, syphilis or malaria, or to maternal anaemia, which cause stillbirth, preterm birth and low birth weight, increasing the risk of neonatal death. In rural Tanzania, as in many other African countries, more than 80% of pregnant women attend antenatal clinic, but few are screened and treated for these conditions – an important missed opportunity to save newborn lives.

Shortage of medical resources in rural Uganda leads to inconsistencies in provision of antenatal care (ANC) interventions. Mbarara University and Ibanda district health team propose to enhance delivery and uptake of ANC interventions by harnessing the power of cell phone technology widely available in rural Uganda. We aim to increase the demand for ANC with a pictorial Antenatal Intervention Demand Card (AID-Card) that will be linked to a cell phone data capture and surveillance system. The pictorial representations in the AID-Card will be developed in consultation with the community.

The intrapartum period represents a time of high risk for women and newborns in Tanzania. Our project focuses on increasing utilization of high quality, evidence based care provided by midwives in the rural Lakes Region of Western Tanzania in alignment with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare's (MoHSW) Road Map Strategic Plan to Accelerate the Reduction of Maternal, Newborn and Child Deaths.

Based on ten years of operation in Tibet, One Heart Worldwide (OHW) has developed Network of Safety an effective, replicable and sustainable training and outreach model to prevent maternal and newborn death associated with pregnancy and delivery among remote rural populations. The Network of Safety is a culturally adaptable program that teaches basic life-saving skills to all the community members and health care providers surrounding a new mother and her infant. In 2008, the program reached a sustainable level and was successfully transferred to local partners.

Women’s health in India is neglected because the public health system is not functioning properly. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of health staff in India are absent from work on a typical day; and it gets worse in rural areas. This problem negatively affects both the way women use health facilities and their health outcomes: Only 18 percent of births take place in a public facility, and the neonatal mortality rate in India is almost 40 percent.

Does hand washing with soap and water or alcohol-based hand sanitizers address the well-documented need for clean birth practices? Clean birth practices, including hand hygiene of birth attendants and use of clean or disinfected instruments to cut and tie an umbilical cord, are of critical importance. Evidence suggests that hand hygiene practices among birth attendants and disinfection of birthing equipment and surfaces are not always optimal. Often water and soap or alcohol-based hand rubs are not available.

Anemia is a silent killer that continues to be a major risk factor for millions of pregnant women and their newborns. Anemia places women at risk for poor pregnancy outcomes including increased risk of mortality and morbidity, preterm births, and low birth weight babies. The majority of these women live in rural areas with little access to proper care. Early detection, monitoring, and treatment of anemia in women during pregnancy, at labor, and in the first 48 hours after delivery could lead to life-saving interventions and significant cost savings to health systems.

PCI and ZMQ have designed an m-health application that has the potential to substantially and sustainably reduce stillborn, maternal and/or newborn deaths not only in Moradabad, UP, but throughout India and beyond. The Universal Patient Management and Analysis System (UPMAS) is designed to overcome the weaknesses of similar approaches to date by boldly overcoming the intransient barriers to access and delivery of quality maternal, child and neonatal health (MCNH) services for true behavior change and significant long term impact.

Equity is key to reducing maternal and child mortality in Mozambique. The country still presents significant gaps between the richest and the poorest quintile for key MNCHN interventions: Skilled birth attendance is estimated at 55.3%, but only at 36.1% in the poorest quintile of the population (MICS 2008).

Reducing late fetal (1.2 million), maternal (150,000), and early neonatal (1.4 million) deaths remains the most critical global health challenge. Additionally 1.4 million women suffer severe acute morbidities (“near miss”).  Development and scaling of innovative approaches to provision of simple cost-effective interventions to improve intrapartum outcomes is needed.

No single intervention can effectively address the maternal and neonatal health crisis in Lesotho, given the complexity of structural barriers to care; the low demand for services for maternal and neonatal health (MNH) and their low quality; and the unrelenting HIV epidemic. Thus, we propose an innovative combination approach that bundles evidence-based MNH and HIV interventions with incentives for participating individuals and health facilities based on all-or-none accomplishment.

mMitra is a free mobile voice messaging and animated film service in rural India that will provide culturally appropriate comprehensive information on preventive care and simple interventions during the perinatal period. The voice messages will be in the local dialect and specific to the woman's gestational age or the age of the newborn and will be sent weekly free of cost directly to pregnant women and mothers with newborns.

Low-resource environments present many challenges for maternal and neonatal healthcare delivery. Among these, is a lack of basic equipment to preserve and protect newborns, particularly at-risk neonates. For example, a simple incubator/warmer is lacking in most primary health care facilities. Devices to provide respiratory support are also lacking. Furthermore, available solutions pioneered by developed countries do not fare well in a resource limited area- for example, reliable electricity supply is not readily available.

Neonatal sepsis is the single greatest cause of preventable death in children living in tropical countries. Most deaths occur in or near home. Prompt parenteral administration of effective antibiotics is life saving, but seldom possible in the rural tropics. We propose to develop a rectal formulation of a third generation cephalosporin antibiotic for reducing mortality through early community-based management of neonatal sepsis.

While over 80% of Haitian adults have access to mobile phones, less than 20% of Haitian woman have access to health care. Our goal is to substantially increase health care access by creating a maternal healthcare network. The DigiHealth network combines a support/call center, healthcare software and mobile computing with the brand, scale, and infrastructure of Digicel, Haiti’s largest mobile carrier.

A recent UNICEF report states:  Pneumonia kills more children than any other disease  more then AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. Our focus is on the introduction of new technology that will make available proven and newly emerging treatments for a variety of respiratory disorders affecting infants in low resource settings.

Maternal and newborn death and sever illness is tragically high in Uganda and Tanzania. There are many reasons for this. Less than 50% of all births are attended by skilled health professionals. Malaria in expectant mothers is a very common yet preventable cause of anemia and death for newborns and mothers. Failure to access the right care at the right time means that minor obstetric complications threaten the health and survival of mother and child. Governments are beginning to rise to these challenges by creating enabling policies and programs.