EA - Introducing the Maternal Health Initiative by Ben Williamson

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Introducing the Maternal Health Initiative, published by Ben Williamson on March 31, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The Maternal Health Initiative (MHI) was launched through the 2022 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Programme. Our mission is to improve the lives of women and children through a light-touch, scalable training programme on contraceptive counselling for healthcare workers in sub-Saharan Africa.Six months after we started, we’re excited to share more about our work so far, our mission, and the impact we’re aiming for. This post presents a short case for the value of MHI’s work, details our goals for the rest of 2023, and explains how you can support us.IntroductionMHI is an evidence-based non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of women and children across the world by training health workers to provide high-quality family planning counselling in the postpartum period.We are currently conducting preliminary piloting work in northern Ghana through local partner organisations. At present, we estimate that our programming could avert a disability-adjusted life year (DALY) for $166, and we foresee promising pathways to significant scale.This post provides a brief overview of the rationale for MHI’s work, what we’ve accomplished so far, where we’re heading, and how you can help. For more detailed information about our work, please visit our website, sign up to our mailing list, or reach out to us directly.Why MHI was foundedEvery day, 830 women die from pregnancy-related causes. These deaths overwhelmingly occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where maternal mortality rates are more than ten times higher than the next worst region. The Maternal Health Initiative was founded to change this.Increasing access to contraception is a tractable intervention with extensive evidence of its effectiveness in reducing maternal mortality at scale. More than this, access to family planning services can produce a wealth of additional impact, providing potentially transformative benefits to women’s autonomy, income, and wellbeing. The autonomy benefits are particularly exciting: family planning appears to be one of the most cost-effective ways of improving agency.218 million women in lower income countries have an unmet need for family planning. This resulted in more than 85 million unintended pregnancies in 2019 alone. More than one third of these unintended pregnancies in sub-Saharan Africa end in an unsafe abortion. These often take place outside of a health facility in countries where abortions are dangerous, heavily stigmatised, and in some cases illegal.While there is substantial work in this space by non-EA actors, there remain significantly neglected opportunities. One of these is the specific provision of postpartum (post-birth) family planning services. Short-spaced pregnancies - births that occur within 2 years over each other - significantly increase the risks of both maternal and infant mortality.A synthesis of the literature evaluating the impact of pregnancies that occur within 2 years of each other suggests a 18% higher risk of infant mortality and 16% higher risk of maternal mortality. Despite this, contraceptive use drops to less than half of the national average in the first year after giving birth, with contraceptive counselling after pregnancy rarely taking place currently.MHI is developing a programme of training to ensure high-quality contraceptive counselling consistently takes place in the postpartum period. Several randomised control trials have demonstrated the effectiveness of increased quality of care during this period, and we currently estimate that our program can avert a disability-adjusted life year (DALY) for just $166, competitive with GiveWell’s top recommended charities.Our workWhat we’ve done so farSince September, we...