Expand Maternal Healthcare in Northern Haiti

Dear GlobalGiving Community,

As we welcome 2026, we are grateful for your continued support of our efforts to improve and protect maternal and newborn health in Haiti. This month, we are sharing several updates from our team as well as a look ahead at what is to come in 2026.

First, some key achievements since our last report:

• We continued our awareness-raising activities, focusing on pregnancy-related topics, in our clinics and via community health workers, with the goal of increasing women’s health knowledge to better prepare them for healthy pregnancy and childbirth.
• We continued promotion of our full range of maternal health service offerings, with an emphasis on the affordable cost of services offered by C2C.
• We built the capacity of maternal and child health nurses on clinical standards and best practices through twice monthly “academic review” sessions.
• We continued the successful implementation of Mothers’ Clubs, organized cohorts of pregnant women of similar gestational ages to promote peer learning and support during pregnancy.
• Our community health team led home visits for pregnant women who missed scheduled appointments, complemented by reminder phone calls to facilitate continuity of care.
• We distributed postnatal kits to breastfeeding mothers attending C2C’s postpartum services.
• We provided new training on basic obstetric imaging practices for two nurses who had not previously received the training, ensuring consistent, high-quality screening and diagnostics.
• We educated new mothers on the benefits of facility-based deliveries, postpartum care, and exclusive breastfeeding for infants, as well as on long-acting family planning methods and the importance of newborn vaccination, providing referrals when needed.
• Following the launch of our maternal health program at our Roche Plate clinic, we deployed a new ultrasound machine, an essential tool in screening for abnormalities and monitoring fetal growth and development.

Amidst so many successes, we also faced several challenges, many of which were solved thanks to the generous support of donors like yourself. Challenges included:

• Women continuing to opt for home birth: This is a struggle we have long-faced but are committed to overcoming through continuous behavior change activities and education.
• Vaccine stockouts: The Ministry of Health continues to face logistical challenges leading to the stockouts of many important vaccinations, which has prevented many of our patients from receiving initial and booster doses.
• Equipment issues: While six of our eight clinics offer maternal health services, four of the probes for these machines broke this year. Your support directly helped us to overcome this challenge so that women could continue receiving the ultrasound examinations they need to ensure healthy pregnancy and delivery.

Lastly, we’d like to share a year-in-review for the Maternal Health Program, made possible by your continued support through GlobalGiving. 2025 was a huge year for this program, and we could not have done it without community members like you!

• We increased the number of first prenatal visits by 52% over the prior year, from 2,295 to 3,499 visits!
• We increased the number of fourth prenatal visits by 33% over the prior year, from 1,059 to 1,406!
• We performed 3,503 obstetric ultrasounds, compared to 1,239 the prior year, a whopping 183% increase.
• Though we struggled with the continuation of women preferring home-based childbirth, we did increase the number of hospital-based deliveries to 471, up from 322 the prior year, a 46% increase.
• Postnatal consultations rose from 617 to 760, a 23% increase.
• Postnatal home visits rose from 502 to 783, a 56% increase.

We hope you are as excited as we are to see the progress of our Maternal Health Program over the past year. We are even more excited to share with you where this program goes in 2026. Thank you, from all of our staff in Haiti, for your continued support - it is making a huge difference for mothers and children in Haiti.

C2C has exciting news to share since our last report: thanks to the continued support of our amazing GlobalGiving community, we were able to expand our Maternal Health Program to our newest clinic, in Galifète! This marks a huge milestone for C2C and a major improvement for health services in this community. C2C’s team has been hard at work promoting this new service, through live radio sessions, promotional banners, and community meetings with local leaders and youth to raise awareness about our offerings.

Although it’s important to expand the reach of our services by offering the Maternal Health Program in every C2C clinic, it’s just as critical to ensure the quality and sustainability of these services across our network. One way we’ve done this is through capacity building. Since our last report, we evaluated six nurse practitioners who were trained to perform obstetric ultrasound, and they achieved excellent results, averaging over 85% on the evaluation survey. We also developed a plan to train two maternal health nurses who are not yet familiar with ultrasound so that they can develop the skills they need to assess patients. 

We’re proud of the results we’ve achieved since our last report:

• 1,154 first prenatal visits 
• 438 first prenatal visits in first trimester 
• 386 fourth prenatal visits 
• 1,099 obstetrical ultrasounds performed 
• 141 postnatal consultations
• 84 hospital births

Generating demand for our Maternal Health Program through awareness-raising activities and education is always top of mind. We do this through many different strategies, including:

• Community education on the need for immediate care starting in the first weeks of pregnancy.
• Preventive and follow-up phone calls to ensure continuity of care.
• Distribution of special coupons to progressively increase attendance by pregnant and breastfeeding women.
• Implementation of mother’s clubs for women in our Maternal Health Program, which provide education on pregnancy, childbirth, and the importance of facility-based delivery.
• Health education sessions and continuous screening of educational videos in clinic waiting rooms on maternal health, family planning, and local foods that strengthen maternal immunity.
• Ongoing promotion of the benefits of delivering in a health facility and receiving postpartum care from a qualified professional.
• Distribution of postnatal kits for breastfeeding women attending postpartum care.
• Close community follow-up visits for any mother known to have delivered recently (in the past 0–3 days).

Despite ongoing challenges, such as low rates of facility-based deliveries and some follow-up calls being ineffective due to network issues, we are still very hopeful for the future. Our team is always working with our communities to develop innovative solutions to these challenges. For example, to further strengthen prenatal visit attendance, we reached out to 33 traditional birth attendants, or “matrones,” from different communities for potential networking and integration into our Maternal Health Program. In order to improve uptake of prenatal and postnatal care, we focus on behavior change, which takes time. However, C2C is committed to serving our communities for the long term, and we are optimistic that the work we are doing now will improve health outcomes in the years to come – and the consistent support of our GlobalGiving community is what makes this all possible.

Thank you, on behalf of all of our clinical and community health staff in Haiti.

Links:

• Learn more about our ongoing projects on our website