ABSTRACT
Despite diverse efforts invested in strengthening health systems and improving health outcomes, many global public health challenges remain unresolved, as new ones emerge. Many maternal health interventions have been implemented with several failing to achieve their intended results. As has been established, failure in achieving desired outcomes may be related to how the intervention was designed (design failure) or how it was implemented (implementation failure). No other domain of global public health highlights these failures better than maternal health. Within the maternal health domain, despite a 38% reduction in global maternal deaths since 2000, 295,000 women still die annually due to pregnancy and childbirth complications. Almost all maternal deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with Nigeria accounting for over two-fifths of the global burden. A key target of the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ is to reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030. This chapter will use case studies of two maternal health interventions, implemented in Nigeria, to highlight and discuss issues in design, implementation, and evaluation of maternal health interventions and policies in LMICs.
