“Building strong and inclusive partnerships for maternal, newborn, child health, and family planning programs is not future work,” said Dr. Koki Agarwal, Director of USAID’s MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership at a recent Wilson Center event. “It’s urgent and it’s ‘right now’ work.”

This exploration of country perspectives and expertise on improving maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health and family planning programs was the third event in a series that placed regional experiences and voices in the foreground.

In Uganda, for instance, Jacqueline Calnan, a Localization Fellow within the Office of Country Support at USAID in that nation, said that partnering with local organizations in Uganda allowed her to learn how to do this work in a more flexible, locally led, and sustainable manner: “Localization is fundamentally about putting local context, aspirations, dynamics, organizations, and change agents at the center of our programming.”

The Power of Community

The local community is a central piece to developing sustainable partnerships. Liton (Xavier) Bala, Community Health and Development Director of Lutheran Aid to Medicine in Bangladesh (LAMB), a hospital providing community-based health care in Bangladesh, observed that when community people are empowered, they take ownership for their own community development.

Bala described a process in which communities are centered within partnerships, so they obtain the capacity to resolve their own problems by themselves. He added that drawing on the strengths of a broad range of community members—including volunteers, schoolteachers, and adolescents—is essential to ensure continuity of health care for LAMB Bangladesh. It becomes easier for people to access care when both the people providing care and utilizing it are members of the same community.

Relying on the support of faith-based leaders also can reduce barriers to care, Bala continued.  Bangladesh is a Muslim country, and the trust that exists between the community and faith leaders helps LAMB deliver health-based messaging and encourage people to utilize health services.

Youth-Led Organizations

In Kenya, leaders see youth as an untapped resource in developing locally led partnerships. “Our youth are often undermined and underestimated in most communities, yet they know their issues better than anyone else,” said Margaret Wanja, Business Development Director at Youth for Sustainable Development (YSD) in Kenya.

Wanja observed that youth play a unique role in social accountability which can improve the health of everyone in a community, despite the fact that YSD is a youth-led organization advancing inclusive partnerships and youth participation for social accountability. Issues faced in family planning and sexual and reproductive health in Kenya are not only faced by young people, explained Wanja, but experienced by the whole community. So, YSD’s work to bring accountability improves services for the whole community.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic brought challenges, it also provided an opportunity for donors to recognize the value of partnering with youth-led organizations. “They’ve seen the ability of grassroots organizations because they’re in touch with the communities that they work with,” said Wanja. In particular, YSD’s importance can begin in Kenya itself, with young people in local communities spearheading change.

Public-Private Partnerships

Strong partnerships between the private and public sector also are fundamental to achieving and sustaining improvements in health. They are especially important in reaching key development goals in conjunction with accountability mechanisms.

Dr. Angel Mwiche Chisha Munkashi, Assistant Director of Reproductive Health at Zambia Ministry of Health, noted that one of Zambia’s development goals is to achieve middle income country status by 2030 through advancing the health of its people. So, the nation’s ministry of health has set the broader achievement of lower middle-income status by its citizens as the next target to meet in doing so. Partnerships within the health sector and across sectors will be a cornerstone in this effort, said Dr. Mwiche. Family planning and sexual and reproductive health programs are strongly suited for such partnerships, he added, because of the joint gains in public health and country development which they promote.

Partnerships that prioritize maternal and child health are also central to the partnerships Indonesia is making. Dr. Kalsum Komaryani, Director of Health Services Quality Directorate at Indonesia Ministry of Health, said that her nation, like other low-middle income countries, has persistent health problems, such as high infant mortality rates, maternal mortality rates, nutrition, and tuberculosis. While these problems have compelled the Ministry of Health to seek a transformation of the country’s health system, there is also acknowledgement of the need for broader change elsewhere—especially in addressing non-health related factors on maternal health. Dr. Komaryani observed that in addition to coordination in the ministry of home affairs, industry, information, manpower, transportation, and other agencies working to address these factors, the effort to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality also must include the private sector through public-private partnerships.

Commitments to improve health and development also require accountability within these key partnerships. “Joint accountability is critical,” said Dr. Mwiche. “It is also important to balance close collaboration with government and respect is also important in this process.”

The challenges in our present moment are helping to shape new responses. “COVID-19 has taught us is that there is no one size fits all in the approach to improving health,” said Dr. Agarwal. Some of these big challenges require a different way of working. “And that different way of working,” she concluded, “needs to be built on new kinds of partnerships – ones that are flexible, more responsive, and most of all, locally-led.”

Read more:

• Partnerships are key to driving innovation in maternal health
• Gender-based equity remains a barrier to maternal health
• Using data to improve maternal health through partnerships