Participatory Community Solutions for the Uptake of Maternal and Newborn Health Care across the Care Continuum: Experience from L10K’s Implementation in Ethiopia

For over a decade, The Last Ten Kilometers (L10K) project has supported communities in Ethiopia to take ownership of their health care through innovative community-based strategies. The project has tested participatory community quality improvement and engagement initiatives to strengthen health service quality and health provider skills. L10K found that these interventions created community awareness of and collaborative solutions for service delivery challenges. Our approach improved health system capacity and increased maternal and newborn health service uptake across the care continuum. This experience suggests that scale-up of quality improvement initiatives would benefit from community engagement throughout design, implementation, and monitoring processes.