The Exemplar Newsletter: July 2024
Exemplars in Global Health
We provide evidence-based insights from positive outliers to help decision-makers achieve large-scale success.
The following is an excerpt from the monthly newsletter from Exemplars in Global Health, a global coalition of partners on a mission to identify positive health outliers, analyze what makes countries successful, and disseminate core lessons so they can be adapted in comparable settings.
Read on to hear from Niranjan Bose, Health and Life Sciences Managing Director at Gates Ventures. You can also subscribe to The Exemplar to hear more from the program on a monthly basis.
Senegal, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh are delivering life-saving results
Some math problems require innovative and adaptive solutions — like those implemented by certain countries to scale uptake of life-saving interventions for mothers and babies.
Narratives from three Exemplar countries in Neonatal and Maternal Mortality reduction offer a few examples of this type of arithmetic:
Bangladesh expanded access to family planning, promoted antenatal care, and reduced barriers to facility-based delivery;
Ethiopia engaged deeply with communities to drive demand for services;?
And Senegal reduced financial barriers to delivery, improved coordination of community health workers, and prioritized family planning initiatives.
The sum of their strategies??
Bangladesh had one of the fastest declines in neonatal mortality, outpacing most countries in South Asia (4.7% average annual reduction rate vs. 3.0% regionally for South Asia);
Ethiopia saw one of the most rapid reductions in maternal mortality in the world;
领英推荐
And the decline in neonatal mortality, maternal mortality, and stillbirth rates in Senegal all outpaced progress regionally in Western and Central Africa.
This is not everyone’s reality. Around the world, every two minutes a woman dies either during pregnancy or childbirth. Globally, an estimated 2.4 million newborns each year die within the first month of life. But in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Senegal, the decline in neonatal and maternal mortality means more women and children are living longer, healthier lives.
When we select Exemplar countries, we aim to identify positive global health outliers considering broader social or economic progress in a country. And while we identify best practices across all Exemplar countries, we also learn that often, there are multiple paths to success.
I invite you to explore the varied, and tremendously effective, strategies featured throughout our research in neonatal and maternal mortality reduction. There, you will see that wins from any of us equal wins for all of us; my favorite kind of math.
Stories
The Community Health Impact Coalition, led by Dr. Madeleine Ballard, is working to make professional community health workers the norm worldwide.
The number of children under five around the world who die annually has fallen by 51% since 2000. In countries like Malawi, more children are living longer, healthier lives following the government's decision to invest more in essential health services.