AIMHealth
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What is AIM Health?

Every day, women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, Almost all these deaths occur in developing countries and most could be prevented. The number of women dying during pregnancy and the number of children dying before the age of five is decreasing. Over the past two decades, the maternal mortality ratio (MMR, number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) dropped significantly worldwide.

For over a decade, World Vision Ireland, with the support of Irish Aid, implemented its Access Infant and Maternal  (AIM) Health in several countries across East and West Africa. The programme ran through two phases, and was being implemented in Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda.

The Access to Infant and Maternal Health Plus Project (AIM Health Plus) was a community-based health and nutrition programme implemented by World Vision and supported by Irish Aid. The programme addressed the most common causes of preventable deaths during pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood in four sub-Saharan countries—Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda. The project strongly supported community health worker (CHW) programming by strengthening their counselling skills, case tracking and reporting capabilities by equipping them with a digital health application that ran on Dimagi’s CommCare platform.  

World Vision's Irish Aid funded maternal and child health programme (AIM Health Plus) was implemented in Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone and Mauritania. The communities we worked with were dealing with the affects of climate change with prolonged droughts and unpredictable rainfall impacting their harvests, livelihoods and ability to feed their children.

Women with a new born baby

In response to this, we are working closely with local Ministries of Health, Ministries of Agriculture, local partners and communities to:

  • Train Community Health Workers to provide nutrition counselling to pregnant women, families and communities to improve their dietary intake.
  • Support community groups, such as Mother Support Groups, Care Groups and Nutrition Counselling Groups, with the skills and knowledge to develop backyard gardens and grow a variety of drought-resistant fruits and vegetables for their families to eat.
  • Provide farmers with the skills and tools to sustainably improve their agricultural yields. 
  • Organise cooking demonstrations to provide families with recipes and guidance on gaining the most from nutrient rich locally available food.

This is helping families to produce a wider variety of foods and provide their children with more nutritious meals every day.

Tools, methodologies and technologies

Simple, cost effective and life saving

We worked with the Ministry of Health in each country to train Community Health Workers who volunteered their help every week by visiting pregnant women and mothers in their homes and providing them support, guidance and advice at critical times, using World Vision’s Timed and Targeted Counselling approach. Husbands and extended family were encouraged to play their role in ensuring both mother and baby were as safe and healthy as possible. The Community Health Workers encouraged high impact, low cost, life-saving interventions such as good nutrition during pregnancy, delivering a baby in a health centre instead of at home where the risks can be higher and taking their babies to the health centre for check-ups.

Equipping Community Health Workers with innovative technology

To support Community Health Workers, we also trained Community Health Committees to assess their community's health needs and to develop action plans to respond to these needs, such as the construction of toilet facilities to improve sanitation. They also brought communities together to raise awareness of healthy practices such as exclusive breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is recommended up to 2 years and exclusively until the baby is 6 months old. They were taught that babies shouldn't be receiving other liquids until after 6 months - due to unclean water.


 

Empowering communities to demand better health services

Community members were also equipped to hold their own governments accountable for the promises they make. We call this our Citizen Voice and Action (CVA) approach. It aims to increase dialogue between those who bear a duty to provide services to the public and ordinary citizens. We mobilised CVA groups to advocate together for things such as a new health facility in Sierra Leone, the repair of an ambulance in Uganda, or connecting a health facility to the electric grid.

AIM Health Publications

  • When an independent evaluation of the AIM Health project was conducted by FARST Africa, results indicated that the programme goal of reducing infant and maternal mortality rates by 20% was achieved to the desired level in most programme sites. You can read the AIM Health evaluation report here.
  • Digital health brief: This report highlights AIM Health Plus’ digital health achievements and learnings through the programme’s closure in December 2022. These include CHW clients’ appreciation of several merits of the digital tool, a link between greater exposure to a CHW using the digital tool and positive health outcomes in Mauritania and Sierra Leone, and a wide range of learnings tied to budget and operations as well as partnering, interoperability, and scalability.  Explore the digital health achievements and learnings of this multi-year, community-based health and nutrition programme in four African countries here.

How we use funds

How do we use each euro donated?
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89%
Programmes

that benefit children, families, and communities in need

8%
Administration Expenses

to enable us to carry out our work

3%
Fundraising

that supports our valuable work around the world