This project aims to reduce death and illness among mothers, newborns and children under the age of five in the surrounding communities of Grand Rivière du Nord and Bahon, in northern Haiti. The project is designed to: (i) improve the ability of health care systems, including community-based health systems, to deliver quality health care that meets the needs of people; (ii) prevent and treat malnutrition among children and mothers; and (iii) improve access to basic primary health care services to reduce the number of women and children dying of common diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. Some project activities include: providing approximately 20 mobile clinics; training approximately 30 community health care workers and community groups; conducting vaccination and de-worming campaigns for children; purchasing equipment and medicine for community health care facilities; training traditional birth attendants; and constructing latrines. Approximately 12,000 families are expected to benefit from this project including over 1,600 pregnant and lactating women. International Child Care Canada is working with International Child Care Haiti to implement this project. This project is part of Canada’s Maternal, Newborn and Child Health commitment. The maximum contribution allocated to this project includes $10,000 for monitoring purposes.
At completion, this project has successfully achieved expected intermediate and immediate level outcomes. Highlights include: 2 Community health service points rehabilitated; 170 Health service managers (95 men and 75 women) trained to effectively mobilize local resources for maternal and child health services; 720 referrals of pregnant women for maternal and child health services; 250 focus groups conducted with 1908 mothers to record behavioral changes; and 6 training sessions conducted on Health Management Information systems with 18 health agents, 5 nurses, 1 data clerk & 8 auxiliary nurses. Additionally, 102 mobile health clinics have been established, 8742 home visits have been realized, 5886 women, 3180 men, 18621 girls, and 16464 boys have received center-based primary health services. Six meetings have been held with health council committees and 81 health council committee members about sanitary priorities of the Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population (MSPP). All in all, these results demonstrate the fact that the project successfully improved the utilization of primary health systems by vulnerable populations, improved nutrition and livelihoods of pregnant and breastfeeding women and improved the equitable utilization of key disease prevention and treatment measures.