Safe Motherhood Campaign Monitoring and Evaluation Plan

This mortality is attributed to complex and interwoven factors, including low contraceptive use, high fertility trends, and inadequate antenatal care. Only about half of pregnant women initiate antenatal care by 5.1 months of gestation, and over half of all births occur at home, particularly in rural areas. The Government of the Republic of Zambia, as part of the CARMMA framework, aims to reduce its maternal mortality ratio to 162/100,000 by 2015. The United States government, through its Communication Support for Health (CSH) project, is supporting the GRZ in launching a national "campaign to promote safe motherhood." The campaign will run from 2012 until at least 2014 and focuses on changing behaviors related to antenatal care, family planning, delivery, and post-partum care. The primary audience for the campaign is pregnant women, while secondary target audiences include relevant family and community members, partners of pregnant women, traditional leaders, and the community at large. The campaign will include products and activities at the community, health facility, and national levels. Community-level activities include counseling and education through Safe Mother Action Groups (SMAGs) and community health volunteers, while health facility activities include videos and radio programs, counseling checklists, and picture-based birth plans for health workers. Mass media activities will include radio spots, TV and radio documentary series, champion chiefs documentary, province-specific radio ads, newspaper inserts, fliers, pamphlets, billboards, and SMS. The objectives of the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) plan for the Safe Motherhood Campaign are threefold: to provide relevant and timely information to determine if the campaign activities and strategies are being implemented according to plan and reaching the targeted audience(s); to provide information to make adjustments to the campaign strategies and activities to improve the campaign's overall effectiveness; and to evaluate whether the campaign interventions have had a positive impact on the outlined goals and objectives. The M&E framework for the Safe Motherhood Campaign is based on the goals and intermediate objectives of the campaign and the strategies and activities designed to achieve them. The overarching goal of the campaign is to change safe motherhood behaviors with the aim of contributing to a reduction in maternal mortality in Zambia. The six behavioral goals of the campaign are to increase the percentage of women of reproductive age who use a modern method of family planning, initiate antenatal care services before 16 weeks, complete at least four antenatal care visits, create a birth plan, deliver in a facility, and receive three post-partum check-ups. The objectives of the campaign are organized by specific health sub-topic areas, including antenatal care, family planning, delivery care, and post-partum care. These objectives focus on intermediate outcomes, such as changes in knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and intentions, which are expected to precede changes in behavior. The campaign aims to increase the percentage of pregnant women who plan for transport to a health facility for antenatal care and delivery care, believe in the value of initiating antenatal care early in pregnancy, and associate taking an HIV test during pregnancy with having a healthy baby.