Knowledge Matters – Innovations for maternal, newborn and child health

With our Gates Foundation funding comes a clear mandate to find out which innovations work most successfully and to share that information broadly wherever it can be useful. We’re proud of our approaches — user-centred design, customer focus, solid evaluation, formal results dissemination. We are also happy about the content of the projects — the needs being met, the aims, the activity designs and the results so far.

Our projects have sometimes gone against the grain. Some feel the people we’re helping — like women who give birth in a city hospital — are not poor enough and the interventions we are testing — like mobile phone apps — are too deluxe. But the Innovations contexts, some though not all of which are less desperately poor than the Concern norm, offer a proving ground.

We’re trying new things, taking risks. We believe the best Innovations will be adaptable and adoptable. We hope our excitement is contagious.

This publication covers aid activities implemented with the financial assistance of several donors, including The Gates Foundation, Irish Aid, UK Aid, The European Union and USAID. The ideas, opinions and comments herein are entirely the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent or reflect the policies of any donors.