Support 500 poor women's safe pregnancy and delivery in Rajasthan

In India,every 8 minutes, a woman dies during pregnancy & childbirth. Sadly these deaths are largely preventable as they are mainly due to poor access to health services along with the lack of hospitals to provide pregnancy care & safe delivery services at affordable prices. As a result, pregnant women from poor communities are deprived of basic tests, medicines &nutrition, putting their &their baby lives at risk. The state like Rajasthan has one of the highest maternal mortaility rate (318 maternal deaths per 1 lakh live births) as against 178 in the country. Even the infant mortality rate is very high (55 per 1000 live births). Thus, HLFPPT is working towards addressing this problem through its network of Hospitals called Merrygold Hospitals (MGHN) that leverages private healthcare facilities for providing quality & affordable maternal & child health services

In the state of Rajasthan HLFPPT has developed a MGHN social franchising network. This network offers high quality and affordable Maternal and Child health services including basic and comprehensive Emergency Obstetric Care (EmOC) as well as Family Planning services. Service package offered by MGHN is around 40-50% lower than the existing private hospitals. The network is spread in 21 high focus districts with 78 Merrygold hospitals;& a network of sustainable 1,940 Merrytarang members (Community Mobilizers). The pool of Meerytarang members is the driving force at the ground level in the project raising community awareness and facilitating the uptake of affordable adequate maternal & child care services by the poor community.

MGHN project will help prevent needless deaths of mothers by ensuring that at least 500 poor pregnant women are blessed with healthy babies. Given the key role that mothers play in the health of their families, the program will also contribute towards improving the overall quality of healthcare in the state-starting with one mother-baby pair at a time. This network of care further ensures affordability of quality services especially for the bottom of pyramid population.This also lessens the out of pocket expenditure burden on the poor families availing quality services. Further, the community based follow up mechanism strengthens project implementation through Merrytarang Members.