By Seade CAESAR
In April 2025, a significant stride was made in global health with the launch of the Beginnings Fund, a $600 million initiative aimed at enhancing maternal and newborn health across ten African nations.
This collaborative effort, spearheaded by the Mohamed Bin Zayed Foundation for Humanity and supported by partners like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Delta Philanthropies, and the ELMA Foundation, seeks to address the pressing challenges of maternal and infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Beginnings Fund is set to operate in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. These countries have been identified due to their high maternal and neonatal mortality rates, often exacerbated by limited access to quality healthcare services.
Primary objectives of the fund
Reducing Maternal and Newborn Mortality
One of the core goals of the Beginnings Fund is to significantly reduce maternal and newborn deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.
Despite global progress, the region still records some of the highest mortality rates, with many of these deaths being preventable through timely and skilled care.
The fund aims to prevent over 300,000 deaths by investing in essential maternal and neonatal health services. This includes ensuring access to skilled birth attendants, emergency obstetric care, and life-saving interventions for newborns.
By focusing on the most vulnerable populations, the initiative addresses systemic gaps and works toward equitable healthcare for all mothers and babies.
Enhancing Healthcare Access
Millions of mothers and babies across Africa face challenges in accessing quality healthcare due to distance, cost, and inadequate facilities.
The Beginnings Fund is committed to reaching 34 million mothers and newborns by 2030, ensuring they receive comprehensive care before, during, and after childbirth.
This involves expanding maternal care outreach, establishing and equipping clinics in underserved areas, and integrating services such as antenatal care, skilled delivery, and postpartum support.
The initiative also prioritizes respectful maternity care, eliminating barriers like discrimination or neglect. By bringing healthcare closer to communities, the fund helps create a safer environment for childbirth and infant care.
Strengthening Health Systems
The sustainability of maternal and newborn health improvements hinges on robust national health systems.
The Beginnings Fund emphasizes capacity building by working closely with local governments and stakeholders to strengthen healthcare infrastructure and delivery systems.
This includes investing in healthcare workforce development, enhancing supply chains for essential medicines and equipment, and improving data systems for better decision-making.
Strengthening referral networks, upgrading health facilities, and integrating maternal and newborn services into broader health programs are also key components.
Through systemic improvements, the fund aims to create resilient health systems that can consistently provide quality care, even in times of crisis or resource limitations.
Strategic Interventions
The fund emphasizes low-cost, high-impact interventions tailored to the specific needs of each country. Key strategies:
Training Healthcare Workers
One of the central pillars of the Beginnings Fund is the recruitment, training, and retention of skilled healthcare workers, especially midwives, nurses, and community health officers. Many maternal and neonatal deaths are preventable when a skilled birth attendant is present during labor and delivery.
The initiative focuses on scaling up training programs that equip healthcare workers with the latest evidence-based practices in maternal and neonatal care.
In addition to clinical skills, emphasis is placed on respectful maternity care, emergency obstetric procedures, and postnatal monitoring. Continuous professional development, mentorship, and incentives are also being introduced to improve morale and reduce attrition.
Facility Upgrades
Across the ten beneficiary countries, many health facilities are under-resourced, lacking essential equipment, clean water, electricity, and medicines. The Beginnings Fund addresses these gaps by supporting comprehensive upgrades to primary health centers, maternity wards, and referral hospitals.
This includes equipping delivery rooms with emergency obstetric kits, incubators for newborns, reliable power sources for operating theatres, and adequate sanitation facilities.
Additionally, improvements are being made to ambulance services and referral systems to ensure timely transportation for complicated cases. These upgrades are not just about infrastructure but are part of a systems-based approach to ensure that every mother and baby receives dignified, life-saving care.
Community Engagement
Community-level health education is essential to ensuring the success of maternal and newborn health interventions. In many rural and underserved areas, cultural beliefs, limited health literacy, and lack of awareness hinder timely access to skilled care.
The Beginnings Fund supports local NGOs and community health volunteers to educate families about the importance of antenatal care, facility-based deliveries, exclusive breastfeeding, and postnatal checkups.
Community leaders, traditional birth attendants, and religious institutions are also being engaged as allies to promote healthy behaviors. These efforts not only improve health outcomes but also build trust between communities and the formal healthcare system.
Data-Driven Approaches
Accurate and timely data is crucial for effective decision-making and resource allocation in maternal and newborn health.
The Beginnings Fund emphasizes building strong health information systems that collect and analyze key indicators such as maternal mortality ratios, skilled birth attendance rates, and newborn survival outcomes.
Digital tools and mobile technologies are being deployed to streamline data collection from remote clinics and enable real-time tracking of patient outcomes.
Training is also being provided for health administrators and statisticians to improve data use in planning and evaluation. This evidence-based approach ensures interventions are targeted, measurable, and adaptable based on emerging trends.
Anticipated Impact
The implementation of the Beginnings Fund is expected to yield substantial health benefits: Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies
Maternal Health
The Beginnings Fund aims to dramatically reduce maternal deaths, which remain a major challenge in sub-Saharan Africa due to complications such as hemorrhage, sepsis, obstructed labor, and preeclampsia.
By ensuring more women have access to skilled birth attendants, emergency obstetric care, and antenatal services, the initiative is expected to prevent over 300,000 maternal deaths by 2030.
Enhanced clinical protocols, faster referral systems, and the provision of essential drugs like oxytocin and magnesium sulfate will be standard practice. Ultimately, the fund is not only saving lives but also promoting reproductive rights and health equity for women in the most vulnerable regions.
Neonatal Survival
Each year, millions of babies in Africa die before reaching their first month of life, many within the first 24 hours. The Beginnings Fund seeks to reverse this trend by improving neonatal care practices at both community and facility levels.
Key interventions include neonatal resuscitation training, infection prevention, thermal care, breastfeeding support, and kangaroo mother care for premature infants.
Investments in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) and routine postnatal visits will further enhance survival rates. By targeting the leading causes of newborn deaths-birth asphyxia, prematurity, and sepsis the fund aims to give every baby the healthiest start to life.
Economic Benefits
Improving maternal and newborn health is not only a humanitarian imperative but also an economic one. Healthier mothers are more productive, better able to care for their families, and more likely to participate in the workforce.
Reduced mortality also means fewer financial burdens from emergency medical care or loss of income due to family deaths.
The Beginnings Fund contributes to long-term economic development by strengthening human capital and reducing healthcare costs associated with complications.
As countries improve their health systems and workforce capabilities, the ripple effects can enhance education outcomes, reduce poverty, and support sustainable national development.
Global Significance
This initiative comes at a critical time when global progress in maternal and newborn health has plateaued, and in some regions, reversed. The World Health Organization has highlighted that despite previous gains, maternal and neonatal mortality rates remain unacceptably high, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Beginnings Fund represents a renewed commitment to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals related to health and well-being. By focusing on scalable, sustainable solutions and fostering partnerships between governments, NGOs, and communities, the fund aims to create lasting change in the health outcomes of mothers and children.
Conclusion
The launch of the Beginnings Fund marks a pivotal moment in the global effort to improve maternal and newborn health. Through targeted investments, strategic partnerships, and community engagement, this initiative has the potential to transform healthcare landscapes in ten African countries, offering a brighter, healthier future for millions of women and their children.
Seade is the Executive Director,Africa Global Policy and Advisory Institute
