Expand Maternal Healthcare in Northern Haiti

Thanks to your generous support of Care 2 Communities’ (C2C) Maternal Health Program, we reached hundreds of women with prenatal and postnatal care and early childhood health services in 2024. We have used GlobalGiving funds to continuously improve prenatal services, strengthen staff capacity in obstetric imaging, and provide weekly supervision and coaching, as well as periodic case and record reviews to ensure care quality. Thanks to your contributions, we achieved these amazing results in the past five months:

• Overall Achievements:
• Our clinics recorded 694 first prenatal visits, 231 of which were in the first trimester
• We saw 577 fourth prenatal visits
• We performed 962 ultrasounds
• We achieved 456 postnatal consultations
• Infrastructure:
• We installed a fourth ultrasound machine in our Savanette clinic 
• We distributed 178 maternal health kits
• Training and Skills:
• We performed a competency validation for seven nurses trained in obstetric ultrasound
• Awareness and Screening:
• We continued our Mothers’ Clubs in our Roche Plate clinic, focused on nutrition and breastfeeding
• We performed systematic HIV and syphilis screening in the first and third trimesters of pregnancy
• Visits and Vaccination:
• Our community health workers made home visits for missed appointments
• We offered systematic vaccination with the DT vaccine

C2C’s comprehensive Maternal Health Program offers high-quality services throughout each patient’s journey, from community awareness to early childhood vaccination and nutrition. 

Education is a critical component of our Maternal Health Program. In Haiti, traditions related to pregnancy and childbirth can prevent women from seeking medical services at a time when they need it the most. Home births are very common due to cultural and familial norms, which can put women at higher risk of complications. There are also taboos and superstitions about first-trimester consultations and not leaving the home for 40 days after giving birth. C2C works to ensure that our services are tailored to the local culture i.e., by offering post-partum home visits, while also maintaining high standards of quality and adhering to global recommendations.

Our community health workers, trusted by the communities they serve, teach women about danger signs during pregnancy, the importance of dietary hygiene for pregnant and breastfeeding women, and promote exclusive breastfeeding. They provide information about C2C’s services and work to address any needs they can. We continue with individual education immediately after receiving a patient into our program, informing them about the importance of early care starting in the first trimester, as well as the benefits of delivering in a hospital setting and the need for postnatal consultation within 42 days after delivery.

Clinical services offered to patients during and after pregnancy include systematic screening for HIV and syphilis, administration of vitamin A to women postpartum, home visits for women 0-3 days after delivery, and follow-up phone calls to ensure they receive regular care.

Finally, once the child is born, we continue education, ensuring families are aware of the importance of early vaccination (OPV/BCG) for newborns and know which local foods can strengthen the child’s immunity. 

C2C’s Maternal Health Program is one of our cornerstone programs offered to communities from the beginning. Thanks to the generous support of our GlobalGiving community, we can improve the quality of care continuously we provide and grow our reach to serve even more women. Through continuous program monitoring, we provide on-site supervision, case reviews, record audits, and verify the use of our data collection tools, implementing corrective measures when needed to ensure we have high-quality data that can help us improve our service offerings and the overall health of our pregnant patients and newborns.

We promote our services in the community through individual and group education sessions to emphasize the importance of adherence to prenatal care and promote hospital deliveries, and regularly follow up pregnant women through institutional and community education sessions.

We have big plans for our Maternal Health Program in 2025, including expanding our prevention of mother-to-child-transmission of HIV services to three clinics, procuring an ultrasound machine for our Roche Plate location, increasing the overall number of women who give birth in hospitals, and introducing cervical cancer screening using visual inspection with acetic acid! Your support of C2C’s Maternal Health Program will allow more women to have access to critical health care and preventive services, for themselves and for their children. We’re excited to see what our Maternal Health Program achieves in 2025, thanks to the partnership of our amazing GlobalGiving community!

Links:

• Learn more about our ongoing projects here

Care 2 Communities (C2C) is a Haitian-led organization that serves poor and low-income communities in Haiti who lack access to high-quality healthcare, focusing on women, children, and those suffering from chronic non-communicable diseases. Our model for community-based healthcare leverages the power of collaboration in order to deliver impact: C2C partners with the government to harness the assets of the public sector while integrating best practices and innovation from the private sector to deliver best-in-class, sustainable healthcare services in one of the world’s most challenging health markets. Since C2C’s inception more than a decade ago, we have been dedicated to increasing the uptake of quality care by expecting and new mothers in Haiti, which has insufficient maternal health care access at baseline – a challenge that intensifies in rural areas. According to the most recent data, only two-thirds of pregnant women in rural Haiti completed the minimum number of prenatal visits recommended by the Ministry of Health. Prenatal visits are critical to the health of mother and child and can prevent preterm labor and low birth weight, especially for high-risk women. There is even lower uptake of postnatal care in Haiti, with nearly 70% of women forgoing any kind of postnatal care and only 31% of infants receiving a healthcare visit within 24 hours following birth (44% urban and 24% rural).

Care 2 Communities provides comprehensive maternal health services and education, from pregnancy to postnatal care, across our network of clinics operated in partnership with the Haitian government. Last year, these health centers saw women and their families through nearly 6,000 prenatal visits–more than double our reach the prior year following our expansion of this dedicated program. Since then, we have proudly launched the program at the Savanette clinic, the seventh and final facility in our current network (and shown in a photo accompanying this report). Embedding our maternal health program at Savanette will enhance access to care for mothers and newborns in the area, connecting families to close-to-home services that surpass local standards.

Other recent investments include installing three new ultrasound machines to strengthen our capacity to meet the obstetric imaging needs of pregnant women, and providing additional training on obstetric imaging for seven maternal health nurses. We also introduced HIV screening at another site, Cité Chauvel, enabling C2C to provide functional HIV care for mothers and children in three of our seven clinics. Other ongoing activities include maternal health education sessions, promotion and awareness campaigns, educational videos on display at clinics, postnatal kit distribution for mothers and newborns, and personalized follow-up for all pregnant women enrolled in the program.

As C2C makes these investments to support safe and healthy pregnancies and births for our patients, we are observing high attendance at prenatal service offerings, and receiving increased appreciation from community members for the expansion of our service package. We continue to provide weekly on-site supervision to clinic staff, with a focus on improving the capacities of those providing maternal health care. C2C monitors the impact of our maternal health intervention through these regular supervisory and at-the-elbow training visits with health workers, as well as with regular evaluations of service delivery through patient file reviews. Key next steps to deepen the reach and impact of C2C’s maternal health initiative include expanding prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV services to the four other clinics in our network, equipping the network with two additional ultrasound machines, and continuing promotional and educational activities to support more births to take place in health facilities across communities where C2C works.