Empowering women and communities to promote universal health coverage in rural Zambia

ABSTRACT

From 2014 to 2016, we supported the national Safe Motherhood Action Group initiative in five rural districts of Zambia. An empowerment approach mobilised communities and built local capacity to take action in support of improved access to maternal and newborn health. The endline survey and a range of qualitative reviews showed significant differences in intervention communities in antenatal care attendance, skilled birth attendance, use of modern family planning and knowledge of maternal danger signs. This comprehensive approach has the potential to reduce inequity and help achieve universal health coverage in addition to other wide-reaching societal benefits at a modest cost.

KEYWORDS:

• Social sector – Health
• Civil society – Participation
• Gender and diversity
• Sub-Saharan Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Paula Quigley is the Technical Lead for Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health with DAI Global Health now incorporating Health Partners International. She was Senior Technical Adviser for MORE MAMaZ.

Cathy Green was Senior Technical Adviser, Community Health Systems, to the MORE MAMaZ programme and was HPI’s Technical Lead for Community Health Systems and Gender during the lifetime of MORE MAMaZ.

Miniratu Soyoola was MORE MAMaZ’s Programme Director and is the Technical Lead for Community Health Systems with DAI Global Health now incorporating Health Partners International.

Tendayi Kureya was a Senior Technical Adviser in monitoring and evaluation for MORE MAMaZ and is Executive Director of Development Data Zambia, one of the MORE MAMaZ consortium partners.

Caroline Barber was a Senior Technical Adviser, Emergency Transport Systems to MORE MAMaZ and is Chief Executive Officer at Transaid.

Kenneth Mubuyaeta was a Senior Technical Adviser to MORE MAMaZ and is Director of Disacare, a Zambian not-for-profit, and one of the programme’s consortium partners.

ORCID

Paula Quigley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5995-0014

Notes

1 The definition of SBA is currently under revision by WHO to be made more explicit as many countries have found that there is a large gap between the defined standards and the skill set/competence of existing birth attendants who are able to correctly manage common obstetric and neonatal complications.

2 In Zambia SBA and health facility deliveries are almost equal across all factors, indicating that most skilled providers conduct deliveries in health facilities and not at home.

3 Comic Relief is a major UK charity.

4 For more details on the programme see http://healthpartners-int.co.uk/our-projects/mobilising-access-to-maternal-health-services-zambia

5 For more details on the SDGs see https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs; for more details on the Global Strategy see http://globalstrategy.everywomaneverychild.org

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Comic Relief [grant number ID 308183].