Support to Maternal and Neonatal Evacuation in the District of Kayes

This pilot project aims to contribute to reducing maternal and neonatal mortality in four districts of the Kayes region. It supports the Government of Mali with the implementation of its Health and Social Development Plan (PRODESS) specifically to improve Maternal and Neonatal Health. The project is designed to complete the integrated community-level health system thereby strengthening the referral and evacuation plan including the transport of pregnant women from villages to community health centres. The project comprises two complementary components: The first component takes the form of direct financial support to the four selected district authorities through the Regional Health Directorate. It aims to make new resources available for upgrading or building new health units ensuring key services are available (e.g. emergency obstetric care prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS) having appropriate transportation in place and ensuring availability and quality of qualified personnel medicines and medical supplies. The second component is providing technical assistance by a Canadian support agency to assist the four districts with the implementation of their operational plans. It aims to help the local communities to get organized in order to set up in their villages a system to effectively reduce the delay in getting women in labour to the health centre. This component also contributes to strengthening the capacity of the local structures to plan and manage human and financial resources as well as to monitoring results. Part of the resources of this pilot project are being dedicated for the analysis of the results and the development and implementation of a results-dissemination strategy designed to inform the possible scaling up of this initiative. This project is part of Canada's Maternal Newborn and Child Health commitment.

The expected outcomes for this project include: 1) reduction of first and second delays in referral/evacuation of pregnant women from intervention circles including mitigation of socio-economic and socio-cultural determinants that reduce women's decision-making power; (2) improved access utilization and quality of maternal and neonatal health services in intervention circles including through the use of a gender-sensitive approach. 3) Improved capacities of the intervention circle health teams in planning managing and monitoring all maternal and neonatal health activities including the capacity to collect analyze and use gender-disaggregated data in order to obtain all the data needed to develop an intervention model that can be generalized across Mali.