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  • Team Mum

Providing life-saving, life-changing support and information for mums and babies

What is Team Mum?

Team Mum’s Pregnant Women’s Groups are designed to bring pregnant women together into groups to provide life-changing and life-saving information on how women can keep themselves and their babies safe during pregnancy, birth and beyond.

Pregnant Women’s Groups have emerged as a popular and effective approach for improving maternal and neonatal health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. Women are invited to six sessions that cover information such as: recognising pregnancy danger signs, the importance of antenatal and postnatal care, giving birth in hospital and caring for your newborn.

If I didn’t go to hospital I probably would have died. Thanks to Team Mum I knew the importance of going to hospital.

Mercy, Mum of five
Mother to five and her newborn who took part in a Team Mum pregnancy support group.

Why Team Mum?

Kenya’s maternal mortality rate (MMR) is 530 maternal deaths out of ever 100,000 live births. This is staggering given that the global average MMR is 223.

Pregnant Women’s Groups are proven to have a positive impact on maternal and neonatal health; they are a cost-effective and impactful strategy to decrease neonatal and maternal mortality in low-resource settings.

Since 2019, we have seen the positive impact that Pregnant Women’s Groups have had in Meru, Kenya. You can read more about this impact below.

“Women’s groups practising participatory learning and actions led to substantial reductions in neonatal and maternal mortalities in rural, low-resource settings.”

Prost et al., The Lancet, 2013

How does it work?

At Child.org we know that meaningful, sustainable change comes from close collaborations with local community and government – and this is how Team Mum works.

We work with the County Health Management Teams to train them on the delivery of content for the Pregnant Women’s Groups sessions. Members of Sub-County Health Management Teams then train local Community Health Assistants and Promoters to run Team Mum sessions in their own communities.

A diagram outlining how Child.org and local government in Kenya train local community members to run Team Mum groups.

Our success so far

Our first Team Mum project began in 2019 in Meru County Kenya. We achieved the following:

  • 6,238 women attended our Team Mum sessions.
  • 65.5% of women could identify five out of seven danger signs – up from 17.4% at baseline.
  • 86.5% of Team Mum newborns received safe umbilical cord care – a 70% increase from our baseline.

You can read more about Team Mum’s successes – including how we encouraged supportive behaviours from male partners – in our 2022 impact report.

After the success of the first iteration of the project, we want to expand Team Mum even further and now aim to support 20,000 women across the whole of Meru County.

We have plans to adapt Team Mum for different counties across Kenya. For example, in Narok County where the prevalence of adolescent pregnancy stands at 28.1% compared to the national average of 15%. We want to form support groups specifically targeting pregnant adolescent girls to reduce the adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes associated with pregnancy for this age group.

Donate today to be part of this exciting journey.

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