Innovators Aim to Improve Health Care for Mothers and Newborns

 Innovators from across the African continent were among 50 finalists in Washington showcasing solutions to maternal and newborns care challenges in the developing world recently. The African doctors, scientists and inventors took part in Saving Lives at Birth, an annual event sponsored by the U.S. 

Agency for International Development (USAID), the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations. Innovators and entrepreneurs had an opportunity to pitch their projects to a room full of their peers and experts, to meet mentors and find funding. 

They took questions about their proposals and explained their business models. Wendy Taylor of USAID said the initiative has hosted over 650 innovators in the past six years. Participants have “really built up a robust pipeline of over a hundred innovations, and so many of our existing grantees also come here,“ Taylor said. She is the director of USAID’s center for accelerating innovation and impact. 

Taylor said the grantees and this year’s finalists displayed their innovations in an open-marketplace setting. They also interacted with each other and participated in workshops - in all, 280 different mentoring and partnering meetings.

 Dr. Phelgona A. Otieno, principal research officer at the Kenya Medical Research Institute, came to Washington to present mThrive, an interactive mobile platform designed to ensure follow-up care and monitoring of babies delivered preterm, or prematurely.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warns that 77 million babies deprived of mother’s milk within the first time mom crucial hours after birth are at great risk of dying within a month.  To mark World Breastfeeding Week (August 1 to 7), UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) are calling for newborns to be breastfed exclusively for six months.  

UNICEF says newborns should be breastfed within the first hour of life.  This provides them with the essential nutrients, antibodies and skin-to-skin contact with their mother that protects them from disease and death. UNICEF reports the longer breastfeeding is delayed, the higher the risk of death in the first month of life. 

It warns delaying breastfeeding by 24 or more hours after birth increases that risk to 80 percent. On the other hand, it notes more than 800,000 lives would be saved if all babies were fed nothing but mother’s milk from the moment they were born until six months of age. Unfortunately, the World Health Organization says this message is slow in getting through.  WHO spokeswoman, Fadela Chaib, said new mothers are not receiving the support and encouragement they need to breast feed their babies. 

“The slogan this year is breastfeed anywhere, any time because it is also, as I said, the role of society to make this possible for mothers who want to breast feed.  This being said, yes, it is an old problem.  We have always been advocating for more breastfeeding because we are convinced of the benefit of breastfeeding.  It is really the ideal food for infants,” said Chaib.  

For example, she said, breastfeeding protects children against many common illnesses. Breastfed children perform better on intelligence tests, are less likely to be overweight or obese and less prone to diabetes later in life.

Chaib told VOA that inappropriate marketing of infant formula continues to undermine efforts to get women to breastfeed their babies. “We are not against them producing this kind of milk.  What we are against is the fact that they promote it as if it is the same value that the milk of the mother. 

It is a lie.  It is not the same,” said Chaib. Progress in getting more newborns breastfed within the first hour of life has been slow over the past 15 years.  Surveys show in sub-Saharan Africa, where under-five mortality rates are the highest in the world, early breastfeeding rates have remained unchanged.