Bill and Melinda Gates: Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health Commodities

Despite significant progress, essential maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) medicines and technologies still do not reach all people who need them, especially in low-resource settings.

Yet many global, regional and national actors involved in the production, distribution and use of these products hold knowledge and information which could be used to make them more easily available to all.

Options worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to assess the factors affecting the wide access to maternal, neonatal and child health (MNCH) products and commodities in low-resource settings. This comprises a global evidence review and data analysis in three focus countries, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan. The data has helped identify scalable solutions that can be prioritised for investment, based on value for money and potential impact, enabling BMGF to:

• Understand the existing global evidence on barriers, bottlenecks, enablers and solutions to the functional availability of MNCH products
• Understand the local ecosystems in Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan and understand how they match or don’t match global findings
• Understand the links between the global and country level evidence and identify potential solutions to the barriers and bottlenecks to the availability of MNCH products for women and children