What progress have you made since your last update?

We are making steady progress towards the objectives outlined in the grant proposal. Our objectives for this grant, awarded in early 2024, were to:

• gather better data to assess our program’s cost-effectiveness, and

• successfully navigate government approvals in Nigeria in order to scale up to train thousands of health workers.
  

We have largely achieved the second objective. The grant enabled us to hire a Nigerian medical doctor and public health professional who has shepherded HealthLearn’s Newborn Care Foundations course through required approvals by the Federal Ministry of Health, Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria, and Community Health Practitioners Registration Board of Nigeria. At the time of writing this update, over 4,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed the Newborn Care Foundations course this year. This provides proof-of-concept that our program can scale to reach many thousands of birth attendants in Nigeria.

We are also making progress on the first objective. We are working closely with a local organization that is leading an evaluation of the impact of the Newborn Care Foundations course on birth attendants’ clinical practices. We have nearly completed pre-training data collection and we are on track to finish the evaluation by the end of 2024. We look forward to reporting the results and using that information to update our estimates of the program’s effectiveness and cost-effectiveness.