With finding from USAID, ACCESS has been working in West Africa with AWARE-RH, Mwangaza Action, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and partner governments. ACCESS/Cameroon works to build the capacity of skilled birth attendants in the areas of prevention of postpartum hemorrhage, use of the partograph (a tool for tracking progress of labor and care of the newborn), and developing regional and national training capacity in maternal and neonatal health care.

In Cameroon’s Ngaoundéré and Tibati districts, ACCESS has taken the lead in building clinical training capacity in essential health services for mothers and newborns. To help ensure that trained providers apply their new skills on the job, ACCESS is supporting Cameroonian trainers to perform post-training follow-up visits. ACCESS is also implementing a quality improvement methodology to motivate clinical sites to regularly assess, improve and monitor their quality of services against evidence-based standards.

In the Ngaoundéré district, ACCESS is spearheading social mobilization efforts around improved maternal and neonatal health. Collaborating with Mwangaza Action, ACCESS has assisted community leaders in developing a pool of trainers to carry out community-level social mobilization workshops. The workshops utilize an ACCESS-developed “auto-diagnostic” tool, which is designed to help communities prepare an action plan for social mobilization that fits their individual needs and is linked to the health facility that serves that community. ACCESS will then help the communities implement those plans.

About ACCESS:

The ACCESS Program is the U.S. Agency for International Development''s global program to improve maternal and newborn health. The ACCESS Program works to expand coverage, access and use of key maternal and newborn health services across a continuum of care from the household to the hospital—with the aim of making quality health services accessible for women and newborns. Jhpiego implements the program in partnership with Save the Children, Constella Futures, the Academy for Educational Development, the American College of Nurse-Midwives and Interchurch Medical Assistance.