Senegal
Projects led by IntraHealth International, a Global Communities Partner, are working collaboratively with local partners to improve training for nurses and midwives and advance uptake of integrated maternal, newborn, and child health, nutrition, and family planning services.
For two decades, Global Communities partner IntraHealth International has collaborated with Senegal’s government, civil society organizations, health training institutions, and health workers to strengthen the country’s health system. IntraHealth’s work has advanced the delivery of high-quality integrated health services to more communities and significantly increased new users of family planning.
Our programs in Senegal:
- Provide an integrated package of maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH), family planning, and nutrition services to mothers and children.
- Strengthen municipal leadership to expand and finance proven family planning and MNCH solutions.
- Increase the number of qualified, well-trained nurses and midwives who can provide quality care to rural and hard-to-reach communities.
- Use the power of data to accelerate early detection of hypertension and cardiovascular disease and advocate for greater health sector funding.
- Position local and regional organizations, including Senegal-based Speak Up Africa, to lead critical health advocacy and programming.
Current Programs
Classroom to Care (C2C)
The C2C project's investments lay the foundation for a more resilient health workforce, ready to meet maternal and newborn health challenges in underserved communities across Mali, Niger, and Senegal. With funding from Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, C2C supports 12 private health training institutions in the three countries to implement a competency-based approach that considers population and student needs and to partner effectively with the public sector. The project is also helping the schools establish up-to-date skills labs and clinical practicum sites and develop eLearning platforms for access to educational resources and self-training. At the end of the project’s third year, 7,046 nursing and midwifery students—74% of whom are women—are benefitting from updated curricula adapted to local clinical practice. This has helped to achieve a more than 95% pass rate on students’ national exams across the 12 partner schools.
In Senegal, IntraHealth works with four private schools in Thies, Kaolack, Saint Louis, and Kolda regions—with support from the human resources division of Senegal’s Ministry of Health and Social Action—to give equal access to quality training to communities in rural areas that are often difficult to reach and far from the capital. C2C has used competency-based curricula, practical teaching aids, digital learning tools, and clinical simulation labs to train more than 200 teachers and coaches and teach 1,540 nursing and midwifery students. With C2C’s assistance, the schools are also strengthening their governance bodies; improving compliance with educational, administrative, and regulatory standards; and reinforcing infrastructural, human, and material resources.
INSPiRE
Through this regional award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Communities/IntraHealth is working to accelerate family planning uptake and improve MNCH indicators in the critical pre- and post-pregnancy period through integrated client-centered postpartum family planning (PPFP), MNCH, and nutrition services delivered at scale in Francophone West Africa. INSPiRE is demonstrating that providing a comprehensive package of essential services to mother and child during the same visit—at four entry points: antenatal care, delivery, postpartum care, and essential newborn care/Immunization—improves utilization, quality, and cost-effectiveness of services.
As of June 2025, INSPiRE’s integration model is being implemented in 14,826 health facilities in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Togo, through synergistic coordination with the Francophone Africa Regional Community of Practice for Integrated PPFP/MNCH-N, chaired by the West African Health Organization, which supports resource and partner mobilization for scale-up. Since 2019, demonstration sites of the project have seen a 275% increase in PPFP use in supported health facilities along with a 380% increase in well-baby visits for growth monitoring.
In Senegal, 42 districts (53% of national coverage) across Fatick, Matam, Sediou, Kedougou, Diourbel, Ziguinchor, Saint-Louis, Dakar, Thies, and Kolda regions have scaled up the INSPiRE integration model, with leaders mobilizing resources to further accelerate national scale-up.
The Challenge Initiative (TCI)
TCI is a global program led by the William H. Gates Sr. Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Since 2016, TCI has been implemented in Francophone West Africa by Global Communities partner IntraHealth, which serves as the regional hub. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bayer AG, TCI works to expand access to high-quality family planning services across the region.
To achieve TCI’s vision of healthier cities at scale, the Francophone West Africa hub partners with local governments in 29 cities to rapidly expand a core package of proven, high-impact interventions. The hub also works to strengthen political and technical leadership, as well as the management and coordination of local health systems. Cities self-select into the program through a competitive process and are required to contribute their own resources to implement activities.
With TCI’s support, cities in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Senegal, and Togo have mobilized the political will, investments, and resources needed to expand access to family planning. As a result, the number of additional contraceptive users rose from 66,225 in the first phase (2016–2020) to 273,114 during the NextGen phase (as of June 2025). Over the same period, local government contributions increased from 42% ($423,924) to 54% ($952,222).
Using these approaches in Senegal across 11 cities and 17 health districts (covering 438 health facilities), TCI has coached over 2,000 health providers and community health workers on family planning high-impact practices and enrolled 32,640 additional family planning clients as of June 2025, averting 156,211 unintended pregnancies and 279 maternal deaths.
Previous Programs
MOMENTUM Safe Surgery, Family Planning, and Obstetrics
As a partner to EngenderHealth on this global project (2021-2025) funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), IntraHealth led comprehensive training and technical assistance for local organizations and health workers in Senegal to address key skills gaps in providing long-acting reversible contraception, permanent contraceptive methods, and maternal health services in Dakar and the surrounding regions (Thies, Diourbel). Our technical assistance improved access to and quality of voluntary, informed, consented, and safe surgical care for both family planning and obstetrics, with a focus on peripartum hysterectomy; prevention of unnecessary caesarean delivery; prevention and treatment of obstetric and iatrogenic fistula; and voluntary family planning.
CARDIO4Dakar
A collaboration between IntraHealth and the Ministry of Health and Social Action, the CARDIO4Dakar initiative enabled the testing in Dakar of evidence-based and scalable approaches to halt the progression of high blood pressure, diabetes, and other noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Funded by the Novartis Foundation, CARDIO4Dakar (2022-2024) built on the Better Hearts Better Cities project (2017-2021), expanding the partnership by co-creating four performance-based district grants to implement CARDIO strategies, including strengthening access to care, revitalizing community involvement in targeted NCD prevention, and facilitating referral to care.
We also helped the Ministry of Health and Social Action to develop online courses on cardiovascular disease, a digital platform called SAYTU TENSION, and an eTracker dashboard to enable longitudinal monitoring of patients over time and reduce loss-to-follow-up rates.
Ouagadougou Partnership Coordination Unit (OPCU)
After the pivotal family planning conference in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in 2011, multiple donors joined nine governments to initiate the Ouagadougou Partnership, committed to elevate family planning in West Africa. With support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, IntraHealth managed the Ouagadougou Partnership Coordination Unit (OPCU) from 2012 to 2022, which raised the partnership’s visibility and helped member countries develop and implement costed implementation plans for family planning. Between 2012 and 2015, the partnership was responsible for 1.18 million new users of modern family planning, a 40% regional increase. Building on this success, the nine governments embarked on an acceleration phase and had reached 7.1 million users by 2022. IntraHealth transferred the OPCU to Dakar-based Speak Up Africa in 2021. With initial support from IntraHealth, Speak Up Africa now independently manages the OPCU’s staffing, partner relations, and financial and grants management.
Civil Society for Family Planning (CS4FP)
With funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Dutch Embassy, the IntraHealth-led CS4FP project (2011-2020) worked with adolescents and young adults to collaboratively design solutions to improve the ability of youth to make informed decisions and better access respectful, quality family planning services. CS4FP helped establish and support national civil society coalitions for family planning in nine West African countries to raise a collective voice in planning with governments to meet family planning commitments. The project partnered with 364 youth ambassadors from five countries to reach more than 100,000 adolescents through youth-led campaigns.
Other past IntraHealth programs
- Global Health Supply Chain-Procurement Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) (USAID), 2016-2022
- Neema (USAID), 2016-2021
- Better Hearts, Better Cities (Novartis Foundation), 2017-2019
- Informed Push Model (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & Merck), 2013-2019
- Behavioral Economics (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation), 2014-2017
- Senegal Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), 2010-2016
- District Leadership & Performance (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), 2015-2016
- Health Services Improvement (USAID), 2011-2016
- CapacityPlus (USAID), 2009-2015
- Capacity Project (USAID), 2004-2009
- PRIME II (USAID), 1999-2004
Impact
63
stakeholders trained in advocacy
related to resource mobilization
and funding allocation
835
students, faculty and staff receiving
new or enhanced health care skills
and knowledge in 2024
36
qualified health professionals
trained in 2024