Reducing Maternal and Newborn Deaths Programme, End of Programme KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND LEARNING EVENT, 6-7TH MARCH 2023, RADISSON BLU, NAIROBI

Background

Over the last decade, Kenya has made progress in reducing Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR). Data from the 2019 Census (KNBS) shows that we still lose 355 mothers per 100,000 live births. This is still high compared to the global SDG 3 target to achieve an MMR of 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030. Notably, some counties are still recording a MMR above the national figure and therefore the need for the national and county governments to scale up high impact interventions to save lives of mothers and babies everywhere.

The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) Kenya has implemented Maternal and Newborn Health (MNH) programmes, in the country since 2009 with the support of the British government through the UK Aid. UK Aid’s support for the current MNH programme ends in March 2023. The support for this phase of the programme aims to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality in Kenya by providing support to develop, monitor and sustain successful strategies to improve the quality of maternal and newborn health and healthcare services. A key approach of this programme has been collaboratively adopting the programme’s interventions into the national and county health systems, using cost-effective and efficient approaches.

To this end, LSTM, in collaboration with national and county stakeholders, has implemented exit strategies that put greater emphasis on sustainability of the programme interventions. In the past eleven months, the programme’s partner County Health Departments (Uasin Gishu, Garissa and Vihiga) in collaboration with the national MoH and LSTM have organized and implemented a series of Knowledge Management and Learning (KML) events in the partner counties. The events documented what has worked well and how, what has not worked well, how things can be done differently and how to sustain the interventions in the final year of the programme and beyond.

Event

A two-day knowledge management and learning conference was held during 6-7 March 2023 in Nairobi. The meeting objective was to share best practices and lessons learnt in implementation of the  MNH programme, with a view of sharing MNH sustainability measures developed by the programme for adoption beyond funded programme phase.  The event was convened by the National Ministry of Health’s Department of Reproductive & Maternal Health, in collaboration with LSTM and UK AID. The conference participants had the opportunity to hear from the people directly involved in the implementation ranging from National and county government stakeholders, other donors, researchers, medical regulatory and training institutions, professional associations, implementing partners and programme managers.

The event attracted high level participants from the Ministry of Health, the British High Commission, the County governments, preservice training institutions and regulatory bodies, researchers, and health practitioners. The conference methodology included panel discussions, plenary presentations and parallel sessions running concurrently.

In all discussions and presentations, the participants acknowledged that LSTM has made a significant contribution to MNH in Kenya through capacity building of healthcare workers, research outputs and policy dialogue. However, the persistent inequities in maternal and newborn health outcomes calls for concerted efforts by all partners in addressing the supply and demand barriers that impede attainment of the global and national goals in MNH.

See below recordings of the event

Day 1 link :Monday 6 March 2023

https://protect-eu.mimecast.com/s/yrQQCng0kUXAJRPcJjtBy?domain=youtube.com

Day 2 links: Tuesday 7 March 2023

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMbH3Bw_t5FbYGjHViGT8K7XtaNVH-KpT

https://www.youtube.com/live/-q8Ehk8z7PM?feature=share