New Partnership with UNICEF on Maternal Health Data

JUBA — The South Sudan Health Informatics Association and UNICEF South Sudan have signed a two-year partnership agreement to strengthen maternal and newborn health information systems in five priority states. The agreement, signed at a ceremony attended by Ministry of Health officials, commits the two organisations to a joint programme of training, mentoring and data quality improvement centred on the information systems that track antenatal care, skilled birth attendance, emergency referrals and newborn outcomes.

Maternal and newborn health data in South Sudan faces a familiar chain of challenges: maternity registers that are incomplete under workload pressure, home deliveries that never enter facility records, referral papers lost between facilities, and monthly aggregation that arrives too late to guide response. The partnership takes this chain on directly. SSHIA will train and certify maternity-focused health information officers in each target state, deploy its county mentorship model to high-volume maternity units, and introduce standardised register audits with immediate feedback. UNICEF will provide technical guidance, programmatic linkage to its maternal health investments, and support for the regional training workshops.

A central innovation of the partnership is the Maternity Data Circle — a monthly, one-hour meeting format piloted by the association in which maternity staff, facility leadership and the county health information officer jointly review their own numbers: how many antenatal visits, how many deliveries, where the gaps are, and what the team will do differently this month. Early pilots showed the format is popular with midwives precisely because it is short, uses their own data, and ends with a concrete action rather than a lecture.

The partnership also includes a component on protecting the women behind the numbers. All trained officers will complete the association’s health data ethics module, covering confidentiality, safe data handling and the boundaries of identifiable information. Aggregate reporting will follow national guidelines, and the programme’s monitoring framework has been designed to track improvements without exposing individual patient data.

Recruitment for the first training cohorts begins next month through the association’s Apply for Training page, with priority for staff working in the target states’ county hospitals and primary health care centres. The partnership’s progress will be reported publicly through the association’s transparency pages, in line with its commitment to open reporting on all funded programmes.