The United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Bureau for Global Health’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP) focused on 25 high-priority countries with the ultimate goal of preventing child and maternal deaths. The Program introduced and supported high-impact, sustainable reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH) interventions in partnership with ministries of health and other partners.
MCSP accepted all sources of health funds and can be accessed via field support. While the Program was the principal follow-on to the Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program (MCHIP), the scope expanded to reflect a changing global RMNCH landscape as well as shifts in USAID’s own priorities. MCSP placed a greater emphasis on key cross-cutting issues such as innovation, e/mHealth, equity, quality, gender, public-private partnerships and involvement of civil society, community approaches, health systems strengthening, and behavior change interventions. While maintaining a focus on technical, high-impact interventions, the Program worked toward sustainable scale-up to include the health systems that deliver these interventions.
MCSP was a partnership led by Jhpiego, with Save the Children Federation, Inc., John Snow, Inc., ICF, Results for Development Institute, PATH, CORE Group and PSI as lead partners, and Broad Branch Associates, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Communications Initiative and Avenir Health as associate partners. In addition to contributing to high-level technical and policy dialogue at the global level, the Program provided tailored technical assistance to help countries meet specific priorities and contextual needs of local RMNCH programs, including:
- Supporting countries to increase coverage and utilization of evidence-based, high-quality RMNCH interventions at the household, community and health facility levels, integrating with nutrition, malaria, HIV/AIDS and water, sanitation and hygiene interventions as appropriate.
- Closing innovation gaps to improve health outcomes among high-burden and vulnerable populations through engagement with a broad range of partners.
- Fostering effective policy, action-oriented learning and accountability for improved outcomes.
- Supporting countries to strengthen existing national health management information systems, including RMNCH data elements, data quality and the use of data to inform programmatic decision-making.
- Strengthening civil society, local institutions and communities and engaging at all levels to enhance the responsiveness of health systems to local and community health needs.
- Enhancing district-level decision-making through rapid household surveys to determine coverage and health facility assessments and quality of facility interventions.
- Applying gender, equity and health systems-focused approaches to improve service availability, access, quality, demand, cost-effectiveness and utilization at scale.
- Providing technical assistance to design, implement and/or evaluate models, tools and approaches to address the special needs of adolescents and youth for family planning and maternal and newborn health services in an integrated fashion.
Click here to download the MCSP overview fact sheet.
