CHAMNHA

Climate, heat and maternal and neonatal health in Africa

Apr 12

Written By Ubåt

Climate, heat and maternal and neonatal health in Africa

Summary

CHAMNHA is an inter-disciplinary research project that will explore the risks from heat on maternal and newborn health (MNH), document behaviour and develop interventions to reduce the impact of current climate risks and future climate change.

CHAMNHA is undertaking systematic reviews and secondary analyses of survey and maternal and newborn health data to quantify the impact of high temperature on adverse outcomes, and investigate the factors that affect these risks. In Burkina Faso, we will document how heat stress affects women’s utilisation of antenatal care and postnatal care, and how the health system copes during periods of extreme heat. Involving potential beneficiaries and local stakeholders, we will identify feasible and acceptable heat-health interventions to reduce the risk of heat stress. In Kenya, the co-design process will focus on potential community-based interventions that may help to shore up resilience to heat stress, i.e cooler spaces in the community, and the use of existing community health volunteers to monitor heat stress and disseminate heat ‘alerts’ to pregnant and postpartum women, and newborn babies. We will explore if there is a threshold above which action should be taken to protect maternal and newborn health and if there are certain characteristics or comorbidities that increase risk of adverse health outcomes during exposure to extreme heat and if low-cost interventions can reduce the burden of heat-related conditions on maternal and newborn health.

Research partners

The consortium partners are universities in Norway, Sweden, UK, and US with funders in these countries, and collaborators in Burkina Faso, Kenya and South-Africa.