Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development

This initiative incorporates a crowdsourcing model - with the strategy of awards and recognition - to find development solutions in the effort to save the lives of mothers and babies. USAID received 600 grant proposals in response to the call for groundbreaking prevention and treatment approaches for pregnant mothers and newborns around the time of birth in rural settings. Specifically, applicants responded to a challenge to address roadblocks to prevention and treatment across the following three areas:

1. Roadblock: lack of medical technologies appropriate for the community or clinic setting.
2. Roadblock: too few trained, motivated, equipped, and properly located health staff and caregivers. Organisers invited "bold ideas for new approaches to provide high-quality care at the time of birth. Examples may include new ways of using information and communication technology (ICT) to improve health and healthcare delivery in rural areas, approaches that bring the benefits of fixed health systems to the community setting, new incentive plans for recruiting and retaining skilled personnel, training programs for community-based or alternative health workers, or better ways to refer and transport sick newborns and mothers with complications."
3. Roadblock: mothers in resource-poor settings often lack information about what services they need, what they can do, and what a difference it can make to access health care or adopt healthy behaviours. Organisers invited "bold ideas for empowering and engaging pregnant women and their families. Examples may include innovative use of Information and computer technology (ICT) to incentivize individuals to seek care and/or adopt healthy behaviors; or mass communication methods that can change individual and collective behavior to improve outcomes around the time of birth."

Shortly thereafter, in July 2011, organisers invited 77 grant finalists to a conference called DevelopmentXChange in Washington, DC, United States, to display their ideas for promising new technologies and delivery methods and to meet with like-minded problem-solvers, global health experts, and development funders. For example, one group is developing a low-cost mobile platform that can monitor blood loss in real-time using cameras on cell phones. Another finalist came up with a solution to the problem for many women in rural areas, where reaching a health clinic during an emergency or as they go into labour is nearly impossible without reliable transportation: partner local governments with private taxi drivers.

The 19 award nominees for seed grants were announced at the DevelopmentXChange July 28 2011. Nominees for transition grant awards will be announced at a later date. Also at the DevelopmentXChange, two special awards were given: the Peer Choice Award and the People's Choice Award; the latter award went to the collaboration team of University of California, San Francisio/Bixby Center/ARMMAN for their voice messaging and animation service project in rural India entitled "Project mMitra."

Maternal and Child Health.