Last week, USAID and partners including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invited 77 innovators to Washington, D.C. to compete for grants at Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development. The day before the grants were announced, innovators sat up booths in the Ronald Reagan Building to display their project and explain how it would impact maternal and child mortality rates in developing countries.

Many of the projects on display were in partnership or worked through the Ministry of Health in their respective country. Below, MLI caught up with three different innovators who explained why the Ministry of Health’s support was vital to their projects success.

Martin Msukwa, MaiKhanda Trust, Malawi

Project: Saving in Central Malawi through empowering communities, health workers, managers and leaders

MaiKhanda Trust, in partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, is striving to close the gap between the knowledge base of what makes healthcare effective and what is actually practiced in low- and middle-income countries. To do this MaiKhanda works with creating community engagement, reliable health systems, and effective leadership. Over the past four years, preliminary evaluation has shown that a combination of interventions that focus on women’s empowerment and improving quality of care at facilities resulted in a 40% reduction in neonatal mortality. These results were achieved primarily through novel community and health facility systems improvement models, without significant addition of material resources.

Msukwa describes how the scale up of these interventions must include the Ministry of Health of Malawi. In order to work, partners like the MaiKhanda Trust must work through the health system in order to strengthen the health care provided.

Yacouba Koné, Aga Khan Foundation, Mali

Project: 3M: Mobiles for Maternal health in Mali

In Mali, an MLI country, the Aga Khan Foundation is working to lower geographical barriers to maternal care by piloting a project giving mobile phones to frontline health providers (Community Health Workers and trained birth attendants) rural Mali. The foundation will then test the capacity of this innovative approach to:

• enhance frontline providers’ ability to provide appropriate, adequate services to pregnant women and newborns

• improve the timeliness and effectiveness of referrals and evacuations

• strengthen the community health information system

Koné tells MLI that the project has support from Mali’s Ministry of Health which is eager to scale-up this project through the Ministry’s Essential Health Care at Community Level policy. It is important for the project to be included in the Ministry’s policy because, Koné said, “We are here for a short time, the government is here forever.” Facilitating the project through Ministry channels will also support its scale up, using government resources and political will as fuel for the project.

Adam Sirois, New York University, Tanzania

Project: Integrated Management of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Tanzania

New York University, in partnership with Tanzania’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, has created a project to focus on increasing the utilization of high quality, evidence based care provided by midwives in the rural Lakes Region of Western Tanzania. They are planning to implement and evaluate an integrated obstetric practice and referral improvement intervention linking midwives at frontline health centers with providers at district hospital. The improved linkages will be made by utilizing innovative m-Health technology, provider and patient incentives, and social marketing.

In the video below, Sirois gives a more in depth description of the project, while also explaining their method of implementation in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare. Sirois stresses that the project is in line with the Ministry’s Road Map Strategic Plan to Accelerate the Reduction of Maternal, Newborn and Child Deaths to assist in strengthening the Ministry’s priorities and plans.