I am back to blogging after a few weeks break to get settled in India!
I arrived in Jharkhand, India just over a month ago. I am here as a William J. Clinton Fellow with the American India Foundation. I transitioned out of my previous role at the Maternal Health Task Force at EngenderHealth just after the Global Maternal Health Conference in Delhi. (Click here to view archived videos of the conference sessions.) I was craving on-the-ground experience in program implementation and I was looking forward to working at the community level—to put to action the knowledge I gained during my time at the MHTF as well as the program planning skills I learned while completing my MPH in International Health at Boston University.
The people of India face some of the highest levels of maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity in the world. Jharkhand, a newly formed state in India, faces higher maternal and newborn mortality ratios than India as a whole. And the villages of the Seraikela block, a region of Jharkhand with difficult geographic terrain and low levels of literacy, experience even higher ratios than the state.
My fellowship placement has already offered me some remarkable experiences (I’ll be writing about those experiences in upcoming posts)–and mentors who are working together to improve maternal and newborn health in Seraikela from a number of different angles and organizations.
My assignment is with a new public-private partnership that aims to improve maternal and newborn health in Seraikela at the community and facility level. (Click here to read about recent conversations at the Global Maternal Health Conference focused around striking the right balance between community and facility based interventions.) MANSI, the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative, is being implemented by Tata Steel Rural Development Society, a division of Tata Steel’s corporate social responsibility wing, and the American India Foundation in partnership with the local government. (Click here for a recent post by Alanna Shaikh on corporate players getting involved in global health.)
MANSI is a replication of the Home Based Newborn Care (HBNC) project that was originally (and very successfully) implemented by SEARCH in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, India. The MANSI team is working closely with SEARCH to train community health workers from 174 villages within the Seraikela block on the HBNC curriculum, a set of modules that prepares community health workers to address the leading causes of newborn mortality and morbidity in India. The team will also be training the health workers on a number of interventions that will target the health of the mother–as well as upgrading several sub-centers within the Seraikela block to be equipped to handle normal deliveries and improving referral systems for complicated deliveries.
Much of what I will be doing over the next ten months is helping to develop training modules for the maternal health interventions that will be added onto the HBNC model–as well as helping to conduct the training.
I am really excited to be a part of the MANSI team. It is going to be an exciting and challenging ten months–and I promise to keep you posted:)
[…] gathering, part of the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI), was an effort to develop effective behavior change communication tools for four maternal health […]
[…] maternal and newborn health, and a little bit of healthy competition. The gathering, part of the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI), was an effort to develop effective behavior change communication tools for four maternal […]
Good to see your work is at the grass roots level now. Must be tremendously enriching. Take a look at http://fifthgoal.wordpress.com/.
[…] gathering, part of the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI), was an effort to develop effective behavior change communication tools for four maternal health […]
I will be watching faithfully!
[…] part of the eastern steel belt of India. I am currently working as a Clinton Fellow with the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI) in the Seraikela block. MANSI is a partnership between the American India Foundation, Tata Steel […]
[…] my colleague, Anupam Sarkar, a nutrition and newborn health expert and Project Advisor for the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI), to Hudu, a small, hard-to-reach village amidst forest, steel plants, and roaming wild elephants. […]
[…] my colleague, Anupam Sarkar, a nutrition and newborn health expert and Project Advisor for the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI), to Hudu, a small, hard-to-reach village amidst forest, steel plants, and roaming wild elephants. […]