The advancing MNCH concept and website was conceived through discussions among an array of collaborators from USAID's Health Evaluation and Applied Research Development (HEARD) Project, implemented by the University Research Co., LLC (URC). The HEARD Project leverages global partnerships to generate, synthesize, and use evidence to improve policy and program implementation in low and middle-income countries. The HEARD project provided a portion of the initial funding to launch the concept and the website.
Global maternal and newborn health expert Dilys Walker and her team at the University of California San Francisco's (UCSF) Global Maternal Newborn Health Research Group together with the HEARD Project team at URC were brainstorming ways to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration among diverse groups of partners focused on advancing Respectful Maternity Care through implementation research/science. In the age of “you don’t exist without a website”, important programmatic, research, and policy information lives on individual project and institutional websites without reflecting the links to a broader, rich network of collaboration and learning.
The team saw an opportunity to create a site that could make it easier to explore these vast networks of collaboration and identify important basic information about global maternal, newborn, and child health research and programing among a growing and diverse community. This space provides a robust, database-driven, directory of researchers, implementers, policymakers, and advocates and their work in the global maternal, newborn, and child health research space. We aim to be a resource for the MNCH community that equitably reflects the vast network of contributions and collaborations to strengthen partnership and ultimately impact.
The website does not seek to replace any individual's or institution’s own website, only to provide a better way to direct, connect, and share important information among partners.