By Lisa MacDonald
HealthBridge Project Manager

I recently spent one week in Tanzania with colleagues from the University of Dar Es Salaam to discuss our project, Improving access to health services and quality of care for mothers and children in Tanzania. The project aims to develop and integrate community and health facility interventions to improve maternal and child health in the Iringa region of Tanzania.

Over lunch, I had an interesting conversation with one of my Tanzanian colleagues about his experience growing up in a remote and rural community. He described how it takes him nearly two days just to visit his home village due to the lack of roads. He also shared the challenges he faced in obtaining an education, and how he now wanted to use his knowledge to make positive changes in his own community.

I was very inspired after this conversation and also somewhat humbled thinking that I would never have the same understanding as him of the barriers faced by families living in remote, rural areas. Nor would I have the same insights about how to overcome them.

This is the premise behind the approach of the IMCHA project, which is using participatory action research to empower local women and communities in Iringa. Over the next four and a half years, women’s groups will be formed to engage local women in identifying, prioritising and solving maternal, newborn and child health problems in their communities, increasing their influence and control over their own health. Rather than being mere recipients of an intervention, women will be engaged in the process of developing, testing and evaluating strategies to improve maternal and child health. To stimulate improvements in quality of health care, a similar process will be used with Quality Improvement Teams at health clinics in two districts of Iringa region.

The project team envisions that this approach will increase community ownership of maternal and child health, bringing about a cultural shift that will lead to long-term, sustainable change.