Impact & Insights - Jacaranda Health

Improving quality of care and outcomes in the public health system

Impact at a Glance

Jacaranda’s big ambition is to drive sustainable reductions in maternal morbidity and newborn mortality. Over seven years, our package of solutions has achieved measurable gains in increasing health seeking behaviors among moms and improving the quality of facility-based care in Kenya – as a pathway to improving outcomes in the long-term.

0 %

Increase in mums attending the recommended 4+ prenatal care check-ups

0 x

Increase in mums taking up postpartum family planning services

0 %

of mums exclusively breastfeed for the first 6 months after delivery

0 %

of program nurses with improved confidence and competence

0 %

increase in neonatal resuscitation skills amongst mentees

0 %

of the essential steps performed during delivery by mentored providers

Impact by Area

We drive impact by designing solutions with and for mothers, and the frontline nurses and governments that support them, and using data to improve quality of care.

Specifically our solutions drive impact in three areas:

Health Seeking

A third of maternal deaths in Kenya are due to delays in care seeking. PROMPTS empowers mothers with information to make informed decisions during and after pregnancy, and seek the right care at the right time and place. Mothers are supported to take up key services linked with better outcomes, such as pre and postnatal care check-ups, infant immunization appointments, and family planning services. We share feedback from PROMPTS users with facilities and governments to make maternal health services more responsive to mothers’ needs and experiences.

Our Impact

Quality of Care

Over half of Kenya’s maternal deaths are caused by gaps in the quality of intrapartum care, and providers failing to act appropriately during emergencies. MENTORS builds the capacity of frontline government nurses and midwives to deliver timely, respectful emergency care through continuous, simulation-based training that takes place in facilities. We share data on provider performance with facility and health system managers, helping them track and address skills and knowledge gaps on a real-time basis.

Our Impact

Sustainability of Services

Our vision of an “end game” at scale is our government partners leading and sustainably financing cost-effective innovations in the public health system. We achieve this by helping them better budget for high impact solutions that improve the quality of maternal health solutions, while generating data that helps them spend limited resources smarter.

Our Impact

Data-driven Impact

We combine real-time data from mothers and facilities with deep, participatory research to help governments find, monitor, and address gaps in maternal health services and systems.

Given the complexity of the systems we’re trying to change, we field data and insights from across a mother’s journey through the health system to monitor the connected, yet often-siloed, gaps impacting outcomes. The research we conduct and the data tools we co-design with our government partners help inform respectful care, improve its quality, and direct limited resources to where they are most needed, and we monitor our impact on outcomes through national health information systems, like KHIS2.

What can we learn from our Dashboards?

We track what mothers ask us and self-report on PROMPTS to understand risks, optimize referral, and better understand quality of care from the client’s perspective and monitor how frontline nurses and midwives are performing through MENTORS to understand gaps in critical skills within facilities.

Influencing Decision-making through Research

Research is the backbone of how we design solutions, and our findings are directing how government partners improve quality in maternal health services and systems

We rely on a mixture of participatory research approaches to understand contextual challenges impacting mothers and babies: Human Centered Design, in-depth interviews, and implementation research.

MORE RESEARCH

RESEARCH CASE STUDIES

What are we learning from our research?

We use a variety of research and learning approaches to generate, analyse and share real-time insights into the impact of our programs, and the gaps hindering timely, quality care in maternal health systems. Swipe through some of our recent research.

FORMAL IMPACT EVALUATIONS

How do our programs impact care seeking and care quality?

A large-scale USAID-funded randomized controlled trial (RCT) led by investigators at Harvard University to generate deeper insights into the impact of solutions on women’s knowledge, health seeking behavior, and health outcomes.

find out more

IMPLEMENTATION RESEARCH

What contextual challenges face mothers and babies in urban  informal settings?

A USAID-funded implementation research project aimed at understanding and addressing the unique contextual factors driving poor maternal and newborn health outcomes in Nairobi’s informal settlements.

find out more

HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN

What barriers do postpartum mothers have to family planning uptake?

Under USAID’s MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership project, Jacaranda conducted a qualitative study with postpartum mothers in Nairobi and Kajiado to identify behavior change barriers to postpartum family planning, and how targeted PROMPTS messaging could drive uptake.

find out more

Impact Reports

You can find our quarterly and annual impact reports below, or sign up to receive these straight into your inbox.

1 2 3 4 5

Improving quality of care and outcomes in the public health system

Impact at a Glance