JSI India Shares Lessons for Improving MNCH

While India’s neonatal mortality rate is steadily decreasing, nearly a quarter of global newborn deaths in 2016 occurred in India. To decrease neonatal mortality and speed progress toward reaching the Sustainable Development Goals, the Government of India adopted the India Newborn Action Plan in 2014, which identifies a number of high-impact interventions to improve newborn health.

Through the Vriddhi project, JSI India has supported the Government of India to pilot two high-impact newborn health interventions – kangaroo mother care and community-based management of newborn sepsis – in Jharkhand and Uttarakhand states. JSI India worked in coordination with the Government of India to use lessons from these pilots and generate scale-up strategies to bring these life-saving interventions to newborns across these two states.

Under Vriddhi, JSI India also worked to increase private sector engagement to strengthen access to high-quality reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health (RMNCH+A) services. JSI India worked with public and private sector stakeholders to develop a strategy to increase public-private partnership for health, using results from a Vriddhi-led study of private sector RMNCH+A service delivery. JSI India is currently implementing the recommendations of this consultation in Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand states.

This week, JSI India will present results and lessons learned from these efforts at state learning and dissemination workshops in Uttarakhand and Jharkhand, held on April 21st and April 27th respectively. Dr. Amrita Misra and Dr. Sanjay Kapur will present JSI India’s work to bring these interventions to scale.

More about Vriddhi’s work can be found by visiting the Vriddhi website at rmncha.in.