LEVERAGING AN INTERACTIVE TOOL TO LINK EXEMPLAR COUNTRY LEARNINGS TO FUTURE PLANNING

While several common themes emerged across Exemplar countries, certain factors stood out as particularly strong drivers of progress in specific contexts. As such, our team has developed an interactive tool to facilitate lesson-transfer between Exemplar countries and peer countries. This resource allows users to position a country within a phase of the integrated mortality transition framework, identify priorities by comparisons to countries in that same phase, and explore relevant lessons from Exemplar countries. The tool includes indicators spanning the broad categories highlighted in this cross-country synthesis: fertility decline, increased health service coverage, improved quality of care, and narrowing equity gaps. Identifying specific aspects of maternal and newborn health where a country is “off-track” within a given phase can help prioritize specific indicators and catalyze progress.

This tool has already been leveraged in maternal and newborn health planning processes in peer countries, helping to tailor insights and recommendations from Exemplars research to local contexts. Additional details on the tool and its early applications in country planning are described in a BMJ Global Health practice piece co-authored with our partners at the World Health Organization and Countdown to 2030 for Women’s, Children’s & Adolescents’ Health.¹

More information about use cases and how to engage with the interactive benchmarking tool is also described here in a two-page brief.² The brief highlights that the tool can inform both retrospective evaluations and prospective planning, supporting a variety of processes and documents including national strategies, situational analyses, investment cases, and midterm or endline reviews. The approach is designed to be flexible and responsive to country needs, and helps health system actors translate existing data into strategic decisions that improve MNH outcomes.