Summary:

Reinforce is building the capacity of the Ministry of Health (MOH) at the national and municipal levels to deliver high-quality and high-impact services. The project is targeting the municipality of Covalima to make it a model of health services delivery to be used across Timor-Leste. In Covalima, project activities include improving the ability of health care providers to follow protocols and standards, increasing the percentage of women receiving at least four antenatal care visits and raising the number of newborn deliveries at health facilities. In addition, the project promotes increased use of reproductive health services especially among youth and women with a high number of pregnancies. At the national level, the project is strengthening the National Institute of Health (NIH) to deliver quality training. With Reinforce assistance, NIH established two clinical training centers in Dili and one in Covalima. The project also helped NIH develop a training participant database and training regulations and improve their implementation.

Major Achievements:

• Increased by 29.4 percent over FY 2018 the number of Covalima health clinics meeting Ministry of Health standards in family planning and maternal and child health. 

• Couple Years of Protection, a useful measure of modern contraception use on an annual basis, has risen from a baseline of 2,042 in 2015 to 5,650 in FY 2019, a 177-percent increase. 

• Increased the number of children who received required immunizations by the age of 12 months from a baseline of 74 percent in FY 2015 to 100 percent in FY 2019.

• Trained 104 of 180 (57 percent) Covalima health care providers through September 2019 on safe and clean delivery, which enabled health care workers to provide quality care for women during and after delivery. 

• Increased the percentage of deliveries in Covalima health facilities from 53 percent in FY 2015 to 75 percent in FY 2019.

• Increased the percentage of women receiving postnatal care within seven days of delivery from a baseline of 47 percent in FY 2015 to 99 percent in FY 2019.  

• In FY 2019, helped the MOH deliver health promotion sessions to nearly 12,000 people of which 78 percent were women. These sessions promote the importance of antenatal care visits, danger signs during pregnancy and delivery, family planning, nutrition education, sanitation and hygiene education.