The Power of Collaborating, Learning and Adapting: Saving Maternity Homes in Ghana

The USAID-funded Saving Maternity Homes (SMH) in Ghana, Innovate for Health project, implemented by Banyan Global in partnership with the Ghana Registered Midwives Association (GRMA), focuses on revitalizing private maternity homes (PMHs) in Ghana to expand access to quality maternal and child health services. This project is funded through USAID/Ghana’s Innovate for Health, Annual Program Statement (APS), which incents innovation and learning. Accordingly, the SMH project is structured to design, test, and learn from new approaches to development challenges. The project aims to facilitate ownership and/or management transformations that will result in increased capacity, improved quality, and expanded services for PMHs in rural Ghana, where access to maternal and child healthcare is limited.

Throughout the implementation of SMH, the project team actively identified opportunities to apply CLA principles. The strong lines of communication with various stakeholders – particularly the PMHs, and through GRMA – revealed flaws in our original assumptions, which led to opportunities to make adaptations and improvements in the way we pursued our objectives. Furthermore, the project drew on our comprehensive M&E structures to identify and corroborate challenges, leading to additional adaptations. As a result, collaborating, learning and adapting (CLA) has served an integral part of the SMH project, providing context for some of the project’s outcomes and contributing to improvements in financial sustainability and quality of care provided by PMHs in the rural Ghana.