The Challenge
While Rwanda has made significant progress in increasing access to essential services for reproductive, maternal, and newborn health, it still faces challenges in providing full reproductive health services and ending preventable maternal and child deaths. For example, 19% of women of reproductive age were not able to their desired form of family planning in 2014. and neonatal mortality remains a persistent challenge with nearly 19 neonatal deaths per 1,000 live-births (WHO 2015).
The Opportunity
The Government of Rwanda is committed to increasing the coverage of high-impact reproductive, maternal, and newborn health interventions to address these challenges. Through the support of the USAID Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP), innovative models for providing post-partum family planning and training providers with the Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) intervention—a facility-based intervention to resuscitate babies born with birth asphyxia—have been piloted in select districts across Rwanda.
The Work
As Rwanda considers the long-term financial sustainability of bringing these innovative approaches to national scale, a critical component to inform this scale-up are the costs associated with making these interventions operational at a national-level. As a partner on MCSP, R4D has developed flexible cost projection models to estimate the cost implications of scaling up post-partum family planning and HBB interventions. These models help health system planners to see the cost implications of changing the intensity of the interventions as well as the pace of scale-up by district. These projections have been used in discussions on the financial sustainability of the approach with key government stakeholders in Rwanda.
