Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

This project fostering integrated rice–duck farming in Nepal will raise incomes through higher productivity and lower fertilizer costs, along with other farm input costs, while reducing malnutrition by providing a continuous supply of protein and vitamin-enriched food.  About half of Nepalese children under five years are malnourished (45% are underweight, 43% have stunted growth) and the problem is most severe among smallholder farm families. For more information visit www.practicalaction.org"

Behaviour change solutions to non-communicable disease challenges: empowering low-income Colombians to commercialize and consume healthy products via social enterprise micro franchising People in poorer areas of Medellin, Colombia eat unhealthy as their diet is dominated by products they can afford: excessive fried foods (often in overused oil), processed products with high additive/sugar/salt content, and low vegetable intake. The result is an unhealthy lifestyle, higher cholesterol levels, increased blood pressure and obesity. These effects are estimated to cause 40% of Colombian deaths.

Malaria is responsible for 21,000 deaths in Tanzania each year. In the dry season, controlling mosquito larvae (which live in water) is not workable because water bodies are hard to locate. Pastoralists (nomads who raise livestock on natural pasture) know where these water bodies are, since they rely on them to water their cattle. Ifakara Health Institute will recruit pastoralists to find and then treat mosquito breeding sites with the eco-friendly and human-safe insecticide pyriproxyfen (PPF). Livestock nutrient supplements will be an added incentive to pastoralists.

In Vietnam, many people have migrated from rural areas to cities for work. Often they are poor and live in unstable environments, putting them at higher risk for poor health outcomes. They also have limited access to reliable sexual and other health information. MHealth for Migrants will provide reliable, low cost health advice for migrant workers via text message. This is a common form of communication in the developing world, and a good way to exchange sensitive information and connect people with services.

Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) delivered by a health worker in hospitals has shown to result in improved survival and breastfeeding of newborns. However, the coverage of KMC remains low as hospital care is not available to many families in low-resource settings.  The innovators want to introduce a new concept: Community Kangaroo Mother Care (CKMC), a low cost intervention delivered at home that can reach low-birth-weight babies in a sustainable way, babies who otherwise may have been neglected.

With just 124 doctors serving 10 million people, South Sudan has one of the world's worst child (135 in 1,000) and maternal (2,054 in 100,000) mortality rates.  A public-private system of micro-franchised mobile health workers, created by this project in partnership with the local government and South Sudanese-Canadian doctors, will help extend healthcare throughout South Sudan. For more information visit www.cbu.ca.

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are vital to the health of their communities. This project aims to strengthen the ability of CHWs to make health decisions, and link women and infants to care through the use of clinical decision-support on mobile phones. By extending their electronic medical record system to CHWs, they aim to improve quality of care"

To help overcome maternal and newborn health-risks caused by prolonged labor we will train midwives on using a low-cost vacuum assisted delivery device called the Koohi Goth Vacuum Delivery System (KGVDS). The device is cheap (~2 CAD), does not require electricity and is simple enough to be used by midwives in the community.

There are over 3 million annual neonatal deaths. Our study uses community health workers to bring low tech but high impact interventions directly into remote rural homes in Pakistan to reduce neonatal deaths. This kit could save newborn lives in any low resource and remote setting.

This invention aims at replacing the razor blade (1) used for cutting the umbilical cord during deliveries at home by the traditional birth attendents (TBAs). TBAs tend to reuse the same blade for a number of deliveries they conduct. This invention offers to the TBAs familiarity, convenience as its easy to carry tied in the edge of their chadder.