Network for Maternal and Neonatal Health in Resource Limited Settings

Sepsis, premature delivery, still births and newborn deaths are very high in Kenya.

A strong contributing factor are sexually transmitted infections (STIs), such as gonorrhoea, chlamydia, syphilis and colonisation with Group B streptococcus. They affect mother, foetus and newborn.

Often there are no symptoms, and thus the infections are neither routinely diagnosed nor treated.Such STIs are usually readily curable, but fast and accurate diagnosis at the point of care is required to enable the right treatment; tests need to carried out at the time when expectant mothers attend their routine antenatal appointments.

They need to be price competitive, be sufficiently easy to use, battery operated and should not require expensive consumables.Current methods however are either time-consuming or rely on costly setups.

Whilst some point-of-care diagnostics exist, these are usually developed in high income countries and designed with that environment in mind.

Thus, they usually fail to translate to the resource-limited settings, where there are challenges with electricity, cooling chains, inability to procure parts from overseas and where there are tighter budgets.Point-of-care diagnostics for Africa need to be developed with researchers and producers based in Africa and with involvement of stakeholders and end-users, so that they can be build and function in their intended environment.

Our proposed network will bring together stakeholders to tackle this challenge.