Malawi Presidential Initiative on Maternal Health and Safe Motherhood

A Malawian government program established in 2012 under the country's Office of the President and Cabinet, shortly after Joyce Banda became Malawi's first female president and made reducing maternal mortality and improving the health of mothers and children a top priority of her administration. The Presidential Initiative on Maternal Health and Safe Motherhood, led on the ground by former civil society leader and health worker advocate Dorothy Ngoma, was intended to demonstrate the commitment of the country's highest office to speeding up the reduction of maternal and neonatal illness and death, and it worked chiefly by building maternity waiting homes to shorten the distance pregnant women had to travel to reach a health facility for delivery, and by enlisting more than 12,000 traditional chiefs to help change attitudes toward facility-based birth at the grassroots level, alongside the construction of new maternal health facilities in rural areas. According to Malawi's 2013 report for the Campaign on Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa, these interventions helped bring the country's maternal mortality ratio down from 675 to 460 deaths per 100,000 live births.