Liberia continues to be one of the most dangerous places to be pregnant.

Why we care: In Liberia, only 32% of rural births are attended by skilled personnel.

How we’re solving this: By training frontline community health workers and offering incentives to identify and refer pregnant mothers for antenatal care.

Every dollar donated to this project is matched (1:1) by a generous BRAC USA donor.

This project will combine a network of trained community health promoters with locally hired staff to improve access to maternal health care across Liberia. As a result, BRAC seeks to increase the number of births attended by skilled health personnel, the use of contraceptives, prenatal care and exclusive breastfeeding rates.

BRAC has trained almost 100,000 women as community health promoters in Bangladesh, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Training includes an initial 10- to 18-day intensive course, plus mandatory one- or two-day monthly refresher sessions for as long as promoters choose to remain part of the program.

One community health promoter may cover as many as 250 households in her area, visiting or checking-in with about a dozen households per day. As part of this project, these community health promoters will receive specialized training in maternal healthcare and attending home births.

Thanks to this approach, BRAC has been credited with playing a major role reducing maternal mortality in Bangladesh from 800 per 100,000 in 1990 to just 194 per 100,000 in 2010.

Focusing on pregnancy-related care, including prenatal care and postnatal care, the community health promoters will identify pregnant women within their community and offer preventive and early treatment of malaria and diarrhea. In addition, community health promoters provide health, nutrition and hygiene education to raise awareness among the community through individual and group contact, especially with women of reproductive age.

Community health promoters also have the opportunity to earn a livelihood by selling 15 essential health goods like iron tablets and saline purchased wholesale from BRAC and receive incentive-based pay based on early identification and registration of pregnancies and related complications.

Through Catapult, your support will help BRAC provide one year of incentive-based pay for 225 community health promoters specializing in maternal healthcare in Liberia.