Distance learning to improve maternal and child health in Ethiopia

To improve access to health services, the Ethiopian government launched the Health Extension Program in 2003. This program relies on community-based Health Extension Workers to provide key health information to the population.

Albeit a well-established intervention, The Health Extension Program suffers from a relatively low staff capacity and a high turnover.

Although under-five child mortality is decreasing in Ethiopia, it remains stubbornly high. Providing health knowledge and information to women before and after childbirth could help reduce maternal and infant mortality.

Nuru Ethiopia and Health[e]Foundation have decided to partner-up to improve the knowledge of Health Extension Workers as well as women’s on health care, nutrition and breastfeeding practices.

This consortium project, supported by the Ethiopian Ministry of Health, combines two technological solutions: an e-learning module and a digital application aiming to provide quality and continuous knowledge on maternal and child health. This blended learning solution is based on:

• A program previously developed by Nuru for pregnant women in Ethiopia
• The LUCY application created by Health[e]Foundation, tested and launched in Suriname in 2020, and currently expanded to Ethiopia and Kenya for pregnant women and mothers of newborns

FID is supporting this innovative collaboration between the two organizations and is funding a feasibility study and data collection needed to scale up in southern Ethiopia. FID is also supporting the development and optimization of the online module and digital application for further deployment in the country.

The proposed solution aims to improve the health of local populations and reduce maternal and neonatal mortality rates in the country.

The results of the study will allow the team to identify the needs and assess the feasibility of this project in order to validate the prototype and, later on, to test it on a larger scale.

Both organizations have expressed interest in positioning this project for Stage-2 funding, after this Preparation Funding, in order to conduct an impact evaluation of the proposed intervention.