An Integrated Newborn Care Kit to Save Lives

Almost every newborn death should be preventable. However, this year, almost 3 million newborns will die within their first month. In 2015, most of the world’s newborn deaths occurred in South Asia and over 280,000 newborns died in only two South Asian countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

With your support, along with a generous donation from a Canadian-based funding agency, we have raised enough money to distribute kits to approximately 30,000 pregnant women in Northern Pakistan and the bordering regions of Afghanistan.

We have also made a decision to expand upon the original contents of the kit to include a life-saving drug for pregnant women called misoprotol.  Misoprostol prevents post-partum hemorrhaging, which is excessive bleeding following the birth of a baby. In this way, we have now bundled life-saving interventions for both pregnant women AND their babies into a single package that is delivered by local health systems for home-based use.

We aim to begin distributing these life-saving kits, and education on usage, to pregnant women in rural areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the second half of 2018. While we procure supplies, and build a plan to handle the difficult logistics for this important next phase of work, we will continue to raise funds for additional kits and data monitoring.

Our long-term goal is to gather enough evidence to present to local and national governments to gain support for wide scaled-up sustainable distribution of the kit in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other similar resource-constrained settings.