Preventing Maternal and Child Deaths
For over 50 years, USAID investments have served as a catalyst to leverage new ideas, mobilize resources, and accelerate global progress by uniting diverse partners around a common goal of saving the lives of women, newborns, and children.
One thing is certain. USAID cannot achieve our ambitious goals alone. We work with national governments, community organizations, faith-based organizations, the private sector, colleges and universities, and non-governmental organizations, along with many others to leverage diverse perspectives from the public and private sectors.
Global Partnerships
Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance
USAID partners with Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance (Gavi), to provide life-saving vaccines, health system strengthening, and targeted technical assistance across the globe. As one of Gavi's longstanding donors, USAID has directly contributed to progress in immunization coverage, providing more than $2 billion in support to Gavi since 2001.
Global Polio Eradication Initiative
USAID has played a critical role in eradicating polio, providing both financial and technical assistance in support of The Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s (GPEI) global eradication strategy. The financial support and technical leadership provided by USAID to GPEI’s Endgame and Strategy Plan aims to detect and interrupt all polio transmission, strengthen immunization systems, and begin a phased withdrawal of oral polio vaccines, along with a plan for a post-eradication world and compliance with International Health Regulations.
United Nations Children’s Fund
USAID partners with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to improve the health and well-being of mothers, children, families, and communities around the world. UNICEF is a key partner for advancing USAID’s global health priorities including recovering lost ground on the health targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
World Health Organization
USAID partners with the World Health Organization (WHO) on a variety of efforts that improve partner country capacity to reduce maternal, newborn, and child mortality and morbidity. USAID’s partnership with WHO supports collaborative activities in a wide range of health-related activities, including infectious diseases, maternal and child health, family planning, safe motherhood, newborn health, reproductive health, environmental health, and HIV/AIDS.
The Demographic Health Surveys Program
For over 30 years, USAID has pioneered The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program. The DHS Program provides technical assistance for the implementation of more than 320 household- and facility-based surveys in 90 countries across the world. Data collected by the DHS Program allows USAID to monitor trends across health program areas and set priorities for funding, interventions, and policy changes.
USAID-Department of Defense Collaboration
USAID and the Department of Defense have been partners since the 1960s. We work together to align policies, planning, programming, and learning, outreach to advance U.S. foreign policy. USAID, the Department of Defense, and the United States Government joined the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access initiative (COVAX) in January 2021, and have committed to supplying 1 billion Pfizer doses to low and middle income countries.
Featured Projects
Programming and investments collectively come together in each USAID priority country to strengthen health care delivery platforms to improve health outcomes for women, newborns, and children. Many of the projects below receive multiple types of health funds—including financial support from the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative, the U.S. international family planning assistance budget, and U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—in addition to USAID’s maternal and child health funds.
MOMENTUM— Moving Integrated, Quality Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health and Family Planning and Reproductive Health Services to Scale—is a suite of projects that works in partnership with countries to scale up health interventions and improve the overall health and well-being of mothers, children, families, and communities.
USAID Advancing Nutrition works to improve the nutrition and health status of vulnerable populations by addressing the root causes of malnutrition. This project aims to save lives, improve health, build resilience, and advance development with a focus on building local capacity, supporting behavior change, and strengthening the enabling environment for nutrition.
Breakthrough ACTION ignites collective action and encourages people to adopt healthier behaviors—from using modern contraceptive methods and sleeping under bed nets to improved complementary feeding—by forging, testing, and scaling up new and hybrid approaches to social and behavior change.
USAID's Child Blindness Program
USAID’s Child Blindness Program prevents and treats blindness, restores sight and provides eyeglasses to thousands of people in the most underserved communities in the world each year. Since 1991, USAID has supported over seven million children to receive eye care through direct service delivery, capacity strengthening, global knowledge sharing, and leadership.
CORE Group Partners Project (CGPP)
The CORE Group Partners Project (CGPP) is a multi-country, multi-partner initiative providing financial and technical support for strengthening host country efforts to eradicate polio, strengthen surveillance of zoonotic diseases, and control the spread of COVID-19. For over 20 years, this USAID flagship project, which initially only focused on polio eradication, has since used its infrastructure to respond to existing and new health challenges to advance the USG the Global Health Security Agenda.
Global Health Supply Chain – Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM)
GHSC-PSM enhances the health care experience in the communities we serve through transformative supply chain solutions by working closely with country partners and suppliers worldwide to promote wellbeing and help countries develop sustainable supply chain systems. The project is supported with funding from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative, USAID’s family planning and reproductive health program, and USAID’s maternal and child health program.
D4I supports countries to generate and use high-quality data to improve their programs, policies, and—ultimately—health outcomes. The project also strengthens the technical and organizational capacity of country partners to collect, analyze, and use data to support their sustainable development.
Health Evaluation and Applied Research Development (HEARD)
The HEARD Project works to leverage a global partnership to generate, synthesize, and use evidence to improve policy and program implementation in love and middle-income countries.
Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Partnerships and Learning for Sustainability (WASHPaLS) #2
USAID WASHPaLS #2 seeks to enhance global learning and adoption of the evidence-based development programming needed to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal #6. WASHPaLS #2 works with partners to support the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector address challenges to quality, equity, sustainability, and scale of sustainable sanitation services and adoption of sound hygienic practices, particularly in rural areas.
Urban Resilience by Building Partnerships and Applying New evidence in WASH (URBAN WASH)
URBAN WASH generates evidence to promote impactful, sustainable, equitable and climate-resilient WASH policy and programming in urban and peri-urban areas. The project partners with local, regional, and global WASH and urban resilience stakeholders to conduct implementation research and ensure broad uptake of lessons learned.
Rural Evidence and Learning for Water (REAL-Water)
REAL-Water supports policymakers, development partners, and service providers to make strategic decisions and implement best practices for water management through implementation research. It ensures coordination with USAID programs contributing to the WASH and Water Resources Management knowledge base, in alignment with the USAID Water for the World Implementation Research Agenda.