A priority-setting resource to facilitate strategic planning for maternal and newborn mortality reduction
The Exemplars in Global Health team would like to thank partners at Countdown to 2030 for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health for leading development of the integrated mortality transition framework, and the team at the International Center for Equity in Health (ICEH) for their ongoing analytical support, thought partnership, and expertise.
Supplementary Materials
The Exemplars in Global Health program, in partnership with Countdown to 2030, conducted mixed methods research in seven countries that experienced declines in neonatal and maternal mortality more quickly than would be expected based on economic development.
An integrated mortality transition framework was developed to contextualize success factors across these countries, recognizing that drivers of progress likely varied across higher- and lower-mortality settings. This framework categorizes countries into five distinct phases based on their maternal, neonatal, and stillbirth mortality levels.
As a part of this analysis, key Reproductive, Maternal, and Newborn Health (RMNH)-related indicators were assessed by phase, establishing ‘typical ranges’ of each indicator. This allows for a country to contextualize its performance on key RMNH-related indicators compared to other countries with similar or slightly lower mortality levels.
Based on this, Exemplars in Global Health subsequently created an interactive tool to operationalize the framework, allowing countries to position themselves in a mortality phase and benchmark their RMNH performance. This tool is referenced in the WHO’s manual for making strategic choices to accelerate maternal and newborn health progress leveraging the integrated mortality transition framework. As described in published practice piece, this tool has served as a valuable starting point for contextualizing country data in a vast global health data landscape, informing RMNH strategic planning and decision-making.
Across a range of 29 indicators, this tool will highlight if a selected country’s performance is ‘ahead’, ‘typical’, or ‘behind’ for its phase. As relevant, it will also compare a selected country to Exemplar countries that made particularly rapid progress for a selected indicator, describing relevant learnings that may be useful.