London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Every year, nearly 4 million mothers and newborns continue to die, most from preventable or treatable causes. Now, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine received £10 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to run the IDEAS (Informed Decisions for Actions) project which is designed to provide a better evidence base to guide future maternal and newborn health programmes.

Between 2010 and 2015, the IDEAS group will work together with a series of innovative maternal and newborn implementation projects funded by the Gates Foundation in North-Eastern Nigeria, Uttar Pradesh in India, and Ethiopia, each of which has a high burden of maternal and newborn deaths. Three questions will be addressed:

1. Have the projects been successful in enhancing interactions between families and front-line health workers?
2. Have the approaches tested in these projects been taken up more widely? If so, how? And if not, why not?
3. Where models have been scaled-up, has newborn survival improved?

Working in partnership, the IDEAS group will establish a Technical Resource Centre to enhance local capacity in measurement, learning and evaluation for improved maternal and newborn health. Existing and new data from each setting will be analysed for evidence of enhanced interactions between families and front line workers. Further, new data will be collected to investigate the extent of scale-up of health programmes for mothers and newborns, and whether survival has improved as a result. Finally, the group will disseminate best practice in learning and measurement in maternal and newborn health and promote evidence for effective decision-making.

The project is co-ordinated from the Centre for Maternal, Reproductive and Child Health.

Joanna Schellenberg, Reader in Epidemiology & International Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, is leading the project. She comments: "The year 2010 has seen encouraging funding commitments for maternal and newborn health, and yet the evidence base to guide programme managers in many low-and-middle income countries is weak. I am looking forward to generating evidence to guide program decisions for action, so that fewer mothers and babies will die in future."