Every Child Survives and Thrives
The health sector in Zimbabwe is still recovering from decades of significant challenges including inadequate financing, shortages of qualified staff, poor infrastructure and obsolete equipment amongst a host of others.
The Challenge
UNICEF’s development programs focus on expanding primary health care services.
UNICEF supports the Ministry of Health and Child Care (MoHCC) including community-based health-care providers at grassroots level to achieve Universal health care coverage ensuring no one is left behind.
The key aim is to get the most vulnerable to demand and utilise high-impact health and nutrition interventions and to increasingly adopt healthier behaviours. Integrated communication for development (C4D) strategies and social norms programming to help improving demand to health-care – integrated with cross sector behaviour change activities including preventing violence and child marriage, promoting birth registration and upholding girls’ education.
The strategies centre on improving access, for all children, to quality, primary-health-care interventions, so as to prevent and treat common childhood illnesses and non-communicable diseases and on promoting optimal child growth, development including in early childhood
Interventions range from: building capacity for scaling-up high-impact child survival strategies, strengthening immunization, use of innovative technology for health. There is an increase in preparedness and resilience in the health system. strengthen capacity at community-levels; ensures gender-sensitive and disability-sensitive services are in place, work with communities and village health-care workers and leverage innovation and technology so as to accelerate
The Solution
Key Objectives in Brief
- Reduction in maternal morbidity & neonatal mortality
- Strengthen referral systems and demand for essential health services
- Drive behaviour changes in health, while preventing violence and child marriage
- Promote birth registration
- Promote girls’ education
- Achieve higher coverage on basic vaccinations for children
Key Facts:
- 32 deaths per 1,000 live births = neo-natal mortality rate
- This is unchanged over the past 15years.
- Principal causes of non-neonatal child deaths: AIDS, pneumonia, malaria and diarrhea
- Child-health interventions and immunization coverage are lowest in remote and poor urban areas
- Women and children with disabilities tend to receive poor quality of care
- Employees in the health sector are insufficiently qualified and unmotivated
- Governance and accountability are weak in the health sector
- Demand for community-based primary healthcare systems is also weak
- Harmful social norms, including religious beliefs and practices that exclude women and girls, persist
- 8 times more: adolescent mothers with only primary education vs those with higher education
- 50% higher: under-5 mortality rate for women with no primary education
- The poorest women have twice as many children as the richest
- Above 90% of women (15-49yrs) received antenatal care
