2025 October
A Letter from the CEO
The Maternal Health Foundation (MHF) has secured a new capital grant dedicated to advancing maternal and newborn health in rural Sierra Leone.
This investment will support three core priorities:
- Prevention – addressing complications before they arise through stronger community and facility-based care.
- Advanced ANC Screening – scaling access to Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) for antenatal care screening for high-risk pregnancies, enabling frontline midwives to detect complications early and arrange timely referrals.
- Emergency Obstetric Care Access – C-Section capacity building, strengthening blood supply, surgical readiness, and reliable transport for rural women.
MHF will implement this program in partnership with Maternal Health Africa (MHA), which brings three years of operational experience applying a grassroots hub-and-spoke model in rural Sierra Leone.
Program Design: Hub & Spoke Approach
Led by MHA: MHA is building out and refining a hub-and-spoke model, anchored at the TeenSafer Campus in Makeni Town and radiating out to clusters of Peripheral Health Units (PHUs) that include Basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (BEmONC).
Catchment Focus: The network serves PHUs within a two-hour travel radius, ensuring timely referral pathways.
Core Activities:
- Training midwives in POCUS for ANC screening for high-risk pregnancies, as well as in assisted delivery and neonatal resuscitation.
- Equipping PHUs with solar power and communications for virtual clinic links.
- Coordinating referrals and transport for urgent C-sections and blood transfusions at district hospitals.
- Expanding community outreach for ANC attendance, birth preparedness, and early recognition of complications.
The Challenge in Sierra Leone
Maternal healthcare in Sierra Leone—particularly in rural districts—faces very difficult conditions. Timely access and quality of C-section services at referral hospitals remain one of the weakest links in the system, with long travel times, poor roads, shortages of blood, and gaps in surgical readiness costing lives.
A Breakthrough Opportunity
Together, MHF and MHA believe that strategically positioning safe C-Section capacity at select PHUs—serving a cluster of closeby PHU’s—represents a breakthrough opportunity to bring lifesaving care closer to mothers and newborns, and to change the trajectory of maternal health outcomes in rural Sierra Leone.
Call to Action – Sustaining the Work
The new capital grant provides the essential foundation to expand infrastructure, technology, and safe surgical capacity in rural Sierra Leone. But to make this program succeed, we must also secure ongoing operational support.
While the Government of Sierra Leone provides a very basic level of maternal healthcare coverage, significant costs—including staff training, supervision, fuel and maintenance for emergency transport, communications upgrades, blood supply logistics, and clinical consumables—remain unfunded and under-resourced.
That’s where our donor community comes in. MHF is appealing to its supporters and partners to help subsidize these critical operating costs, ensuring that lifesaving services do not falter once the capital is in place.