While Ethiopia has successfully reduced under-five childhood mortality, there

As part of national efforts to strengthen civil registration and vital statistics, the goal of this project is to overcome the maternal, newborn, and child health "Know-Do Gap" in Ethiopia by piloting a low-cost, high-quality cause-of-death (COD) data collection and monitoring system at the national level. This will enable the development of scalable solutions to address critical gaps in maternal and child mortality that can influence local, national, and global efforts.

This project aims to generate a national open-sourcecatalogue for COD data from 1990 onward. It is also piloting a "Global Resource to Accelerate Accurate Death Estimation and Evaluation (GRADE)" platform to decrease the cost, while increasing the quality and feasibility, of COD surveys.

This project is increasing the quality of local evidence to help guide Ethiopian priorities by building awareness of causes of maternal, childhood, and neonatal deaths. It is also contributing to emerging evidence at the global level under the Centre of Excellence for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Systems. This is also part of Canada's contribution to the work being undertaken through the Global Financing Facility focusing on the challenges facing many high burden countries to improve maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health.

The project will provide Ethiopia with its first-ever representative data on the causes of neonatal and maternal deaths, which will serve to better identify gaps in health services for mothers and children. The evidence will link causes of death to maternal and child health outcomes, which can be used to inform future policy. This will contribute to Ethiopia’s commitment on reducing preventable deaths by 40% by 2030, as proposed by the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Government of Ethiopia is committed to improving maternal health. While some key indicators have improved, maternal mortality has not decreased significantly. The Ethiopian Health Department data suggests many of these maternal and neonatal deaths arise from home births in the absence of a skilled and experienced birth attendant. Strengthening community-based services is therefore important to ensure that mothers have access to services that result in safer deliveries.

This project is implementing interventions such as:

The project team is evaluating the use of improved maternal waiting areas and health extension workers for their impact on maternal health outcomes. The research is being carried out in close partnership with the Ethiopian Health Department. Researchers are identify interventions that are the most effective at improving maternal and child health services with a view to scale up nationally.