PANSAA - Partnership for Accelerating Neonatal Survival Across Africa

Partnership for Accelerating Neonatal Survival Across Africa

Together, we can give African Newborns an equal opportunity to survive and thrive, helping to close longstanding gaps in equity for neonatal research leadership, including by race, gender, and language.

Our partnership includes and elevates the voices of African parents in co-designing and helping to answer research questions.

WHY focus on neonatal care in Africa?

1.1 million African newborns die each year

— not from rare or untreatable conditions, but because lifesaving neonatal

The Sustainable Development Goal for 2030 is clear:

Every country should bring neonatal deaths below 12 per 1,000 births.

BUT most of the 46 sub-Saharan African countries are off-track.

WHO is PANSAA?

The Partnership for Accelerating Neonatal Survival Across Africa (PANSAA) is a dynamic new partnership to improve neonatal quality of care across Africa through evidence-based implementation, and generating locally-led research with support for the development of research skills.

An international alliance of clinical, biomedical, and public health experts from 23 leading institutions and organizations (17 in Africa), united to end preventable newborn deaths in African hospitals. NEST360 supports African governments to implement a package of care that includes affordable technologies, training for clinicians and biomedical technicians, and locally-owned data to deliver high quality Small and Sick Newborn care.

Founded in 2021, ANA involves neonatal and paediatric professionals from nearly all 46 sub-Saharan countries to lead change in neonatal care. The African Neonatal Network (ANN), an initiative between ANA and Vermont Oxford Network, operates in 23 hospitals.

The Newborn Toolkit is a one-stop website for Small and Sick Newborn Care. Hosting more than 1000 tools, resources, and implementation learnings in 15 languages, and with a flagship webinar programme covering key topics and issues, our community of practice has members from 196 countries, with more than 55,000 users in the last year.

With a majority-African, women-led team, PANSAA is helping to reshape how Africa answers the newborn crisis — bringing together clinicians, engineers, laboratory personnel, policymakers, and parents to form the largest neonatal network on the continent.

Data for action:

Aligning large-scale data from 160 neonatal units across 8 countries to improve quality of care. At an annual partnership workshop, we will co-create a minimum set of indicators and definitions for a dataset to follow-up high-risk newborns. This will facilitate data use and later research to better tracking child development and health outcomes.

Implementation research:

Prioritising high-impact interventions like Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) and neonatal infection management. For KMC, we will collate and design relevant tools and job aids, as well as collectively agreeing on priority research questions to publish research papers. PANSAA will track the coverage, quality, detection, and outcomes for infection prevention and care in neonatal wards. We will also implement innovative approaches for detecting hospital-acquired outbreaks.

Skills for the future:

Supporting the next generation of African early-career implementation researchers through training, mentorship, and yearly skill-building workshops to cover quantitative and qualitative data, implementation research, economic evaluation, and grant applications for partner- ship sustainability.

Worldwide

Sharing tools, resources, and research findings through the Newborn Toolkit (www.newborntoolkit.org), used in 196 countries.

PANSAA Early Career Researcher Mentorship Scheme

PANSAA is committed to supporting African Early Career Researchers (ECRs). Six mentees affiliated with NEST360 and ANN, two per workstream, will be paired with experienced interdisciplinary PANSAA mentors across Infection Prevention and Control, Kangaroo Mother Care, and Data Systems workstreams. Overall support and skills development opportunities will be targeted to mentee needs. Depending on interests, mentees will build skills linking to quantitative, qualitative, and economic research methods. Mentees will participate in an annual workshop where partners will review and discuss data, collectively developing materials to disseminate research results, with a target of submitting at least one publication per workstream annually. Mentees will be instructed in publication and grant writing, with the aim to build and sustain PANSAA as an African-led partnership.

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