Help reduce maternal health risks and needless deaths during childbirth by providing mothers access to prenatal care in South Sudan.

Why we care: In South Sudan, only 47 percent of women receive any prenatal care and only 15 percent give birth with the assistance of skilled health personnel.

How we’re solving this: Training frontline community health promoters and offering incentives to identify and refer pregnant mothers for prenatal care across South Sudan.

This project will combine a network of trained community health promoters with locally hired staff to improve access to maternal health care across South Sudan. 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 health care and attending home births.

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.

Thanks to this approach, BRAC has been credited with playing a major role reducing maternal mortality in Bangladesh from 800 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990 to just 194 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2011.

Your support will help BRAC provide one year of refresher trainings and incentive-based pay for 100 community health promoters specializing in maternal healthcare in South Sudan; plus one year of support for one staff nurse to help coordinate community health promoters and provide more specialized care for high-risk pregnancies.