MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership works in partnership with Youth Advocacy on Rights and Opportunities (YARO) and the Ghana Health Service in 28 health facilities in northern Ghana to create and scale systems that empower youth to hold their health systems accountable. Using the Integrated Technical and Organizational Capacity Assessment tool (a participatory organizational assessment process) and youth-centered technical assistance, the project strengthens YARO’s capacity to implement a youth-led social accountability approach. The social accountability process aims to improve the quality and responsiveness of young people’s family planning and reproductive health services. MOMENTUM will document lessons learned from its youth-led social accountability initiatives in Ghana and Kenya to contribute to growing the evidence base on this topic.

Check out our landscape analysis to learn how youth are holding their health systems accountable for family planning and reproductive health care.

In Ghana, 87 percent of pregnant women attend four or more prenatal care visits and skilled health workers conduct 74 percent of deliveries.² However, discrepancies in the quality of care that expecting mothers receive mean that Ghana continues to struggle to reduce child, newborn, and maternal deaths. MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership helps improve the capacity of health systems in the Northern, North East, Upper East, and Upper West regions to provide high-quality reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health care, family planning, and nutrition services so that more Ghanaian women and children can stay healthy and live long lives. We use hands-on, practical approaches to build the knowledge, skills,  and confidence of district health managers and their teams to analyze facility data,  provide clinical mentoring, and address the root causes of poor quality health services for mothers and their children.

From May 2020 to February 2021, MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership worked with the Government of Ghana to provide health workers in the Western Region with the tools they needed to successfully care for women and children during the pandemic.  MOMENTUM scaled up regional communities of practice across the country to enable health workers at COVID-19 treatment centers to exchange data and knowledge with each other in order to provide quality clinical care. We also conducted trainings, facilitated peer learning sessions, and provided onsite supervisory visits to strengthen the capacity of District Health Management Teams and primary health care workers in six regions on COVID-19 topics.

Check out this list of essential supplies for curbing infections in health facilities and keeping health care safe and accessible during a pandemic. You can also read our blog about how we worked in five countries, including Ghana, to train health facilities on infection prevention and control standards.

Beginning in April 2022, 13 months after COVID-19 vaccines were introduced in Ghana, the number of people getting vaccinated began to decline due to the unavailability of vaccines. When vaccines became available again, rates did not increase as expected, due to widespread misinformation and disinformation that proliferated while people were waiting for vaccines. To address this challenge, MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity is working with civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to address vaccine hesitancy and stimulate demand for COVID-19 vaccines. MOMENTUM supports NGOs and health promotion officers on the timely collection and transmission of data. The NGOs are using a human-centered design approach to engage hesitant populations and priority groups.