Introduction 

VSO is an international Non-Governmental development organization which works to create a fair world for everyone. VSO promotes volunteering for development and work through committed volunteers to deliver high impact interventions. VSO is currently operating in 23 countries implementing programmes with focus on education, health and livelihoods sectors.

VSO works to improve Maternal and Newborn Health/MNH/ outcomes for primary actors, including marginalized, vulnerable, and hard-to-reach women and newborns.  The goal of its MNH programme is to increase uptake of quality, evidence based MNH interventions at community and facility level to promote healthy pregnancy, safe delivery, and essential newborn care.

Objective

VSO’s global MNH Programme will be implemented in countries which include Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Uganda each of which have prior experience developing and implementing MNH programmes in respect of which a need is felt to build upon prior programming and lessons learned in order to strengthen the programme quality, outcomes and impact. As part of this plan VSO intends to carry out a comparative review of the standard operating procedures, policies and regulations set to guide operations of the primary level health facilities in the MNH programme implementing countries aiming at identifying possible policy interventions. To this end VSO is currently accepting expression of interest/EOI/ from suitably qualified consultants/firms for the provision of a consultancy service to conduct comparative policy review and analysis.  The expected deliverables of the consultancy service include

1. A compilation of the national policies, standard operating procedures and operational guidelines that are designed to be operationalized at the primary health facilities in Uganda, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia.
2. Provide a comparative analysis between the three countries and comparison with relevant regional (AU) and Global (WHO) reference benchmarks.
3. A social exclusion and gender analysis of the policies, standard operating procedures and operational guidelines showing how they impact on access to MNH services by vulnerable and marginalized groups.
4. An outline of possible policy interventions.