KARACHI: A five-year project aimed at improving maternal, child and adolescent health in Pakistan was launched at the Aga Khan University (AKU) on Thursday.

Under the $25 million project titled Umeed-i-Nau (new hope) funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the AKU will work with public-sector primary care providers to improve quality of care in the rural areas of Balochistan, southern Punjab and Sindh as well as urban slums in Karachi.

The districts include Badin, Dadu, Hyderabad/Matiari, Karachi, Jaffarabad, Jamshoro, Lasbela, Mirpurkhas, Muzaffargarh, Nasirabad, Qambar Shahdadkot, Rahim Yar Khan, Sanghar and Thatta.

The project also includes a groundbreaking effort to provide health education through schools for adolescent girls in Pakistan.

“The federal and provincial governments, public and private institutions, civil society and every one of us have to team up to meet the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030,” said Professor Zulfiqar Bhutta, founding director of the AKU Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health.

Projects like Umeed-i-Nau, he said, could help Pakistan achieve Goal 3 for health, which also required additional investments for improving nutrition, keeping children in schools and addressing environmental health and gender equity.

The project will operate through a new research centre, the Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health, which will be established through a generous gift of Rs2bn from the Hashoo Foundation.

“The project will test a variety of approaches in an effort to develop insights and evidence that can influence policy across the country and beyond its borders,” professor Bhutta said, adding that it would help reduce stillbirths and newborn deaths by 20pc as well as deaths from pneumonia and diarrhoea by 30pc.

Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2016