SEPTEMBER NEWSLETTER: BABIES AND MOTHERS ALIVE BEGINS OUR TRANSITION TO SCALE JOURNEY

Babies and Mothers Alive will now be scaling our Mama Ambassador Program adolescent mother peer-support groups till age three and extending the BAMA Core Program to the Masaka District

Tomorrow marks the first day of fall, and our staff and partners at Babies and Mothers Alive (BAMA) both here in the US and in Uganda, hope that you and our entire community of supporters have enjoyed a wonderful and energizing summer. At BAMA, we feel especially inspired and grateful for the opportunities that lie ahead for us and our partnering communities in the coming years. We thank you as always for your support; for as you will learn through this newsletter, your donations are being leveraged to even greater resources that support our ambitious Transition to Scale vision for the BAMA Program.

Thanks to the generous support of the Canadian Government's Grand Challenges Canada Program, we are pleased to announce that we are scaling both our BAMA Core Program and the Mama Ambassador Project. As you know, the BAMA Program has for the past seven years, worked to dramatically improve the quality of maternal, reproductive, and newborn health care in the Rakai and Kyotera Districts of Uganda, serving about 600,000 people. Our Mama Ambassador Project (MAP) is a peer-support group model that supports 1000 adolescent mothers and babies through monthly parenting sessions and has proven to improve both early childhood health and development and maternal mental health.

The BAMA Core Program will now be introduced to two adjoining districts, both urban Masaka City, as well as the surrounding rural Masaka District. This will allow us to improve outcomes for an additional 17,000 deliveries annually while improving the health of 68,000 women of reproductive age. The MAP will be extended to serve young mothers and children through the age of three. Extensive research has shown that 0-3 interventions are vital to improving a wide array of health, developmental, and educational outcomes. We will also be testing a new partnership model with the Adara Group, an Australian-based non-profit working in central Uganda to improve the quality of newborn intensive care. This collaboration will be a learning exchange, where BAMA will share our expertise in ensuring quality maternal health care, and Adara will support improvements in our newborn care initiatives.

Our Transition to Scale vision is ambitious. Our ultimate goal is to expand our proven BAMA Program innovations regionally, beyond the districts directly managed by our staff. Here is our 3-tiered approach:

1. Expand BAMA to our neighboring districts in the Masaka Region By 2024, we expand to Masaka and Kulungu, followed by the entire Masaka Region (2027), serving a total of 2,218,286 people. We adapt our model to support the sustainable integration of our core interventions into the existing government health system.

2. Identify NGO partners in Uganda Building a network of NGOs and stakeholders we will disseminate our innovations, scale their reach, and integrate them into the government health system.

3. Integrate BAMA into the district and national health system Senior staff are respected thought leaders who will advocate for the integration of BAMA into the district and national health system. We encourage adoption of key components of our program model. We have already seen our Maternal and Newborn Obstetrics Complication Survey (MNOCS)integrated into the government health data system.

As always, we thank you for your steadfast support through the years. Your generosity is promoting quality health care as a human right and we could not be more grateful.

Thank You