The Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs-led Breakthrough ACTION project, USAID’s flagship social and behavior change initiative, is charged with improving a number of health outcomes in Northern Nigeria, including maternal and child health, nutrition and family planning.
The big question is this: How can we make the radical change necessary to save mothers and their babies? In our search for answers, we used a human-centered design approach, interviewing more than 290 people in Bauchi, Kebbi and Sokoto states in late 2018. CCP was assisted in this massive undertaking by ThinkAction and Save the Children.
The most populous country in Africa, Nigeria has seen improvements in maternal, newborn, and child health and nutrition indicators in recent years. But despite this progress, 13 percent of child deaths worldwide occur here. And one Nigerian woman dies every 13 minutes – that’s 109 women dying each day – from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.
