Russia

WIN
The Women and Infant Health Strategy

The Women and Infant Health (WIN) Strategy project is a three-year comprehensive reproductive health project, which is being implemented through a close partnership with the Russia Ministry of Health, USAID/Russia, TASC/JSI, and three subcontractors—Engender Health (formerly AVSC), Johns Hopkins University Center for Communications Programs (JHU/CCP), and University Research Co., LLC (URC).

The WIN project builds upon lessons learned from the successful Women's Reproductive Health Program (WRHP) that was designed to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity through the enhancement of family planning and counseling services.

Despite the success of the WRHP, the women in Russia continued to suffer from numerous health problems during their reproductive years—high abortion rates, a high incidence of sexually transmitted infections, high rates of domestic violence, and a high prevalence of anemia. Thus, USAID/Russia identified the need to build on its previous efforts in women's health and expand its efforts to encompass additional areas affecting women's health, including those that affect infant health. In September 1998, a team representing USAID/ Russia and USAID/Washington designed the WIN project, which emphasizes service restructuring and provider training to reduce the incidence of missed opportunities to identify, counsel, and treat women on a variety of health-related issues by health care providers.

The WIN project has three main components:

• Improving the quality of maternal and newborn services.
• Increasing access to high-quality reproductive health services.
• Increasing demand for these services among the population.

Through the strategic approaches and activities of these components, the expected results of the project include—

• Reduction in overall abortion rates, with a significant reduction in repeat abortions.
• Increase in modern contraceptive use among sexually active women.
• Increase in number of women exclusively breastfeeding.Increase in the number of hospitals offering postpartum rooming-in to mothers.
• Increase in the number of hospitals offering family-centered maternity care (FCMC) as a birthing option.
• Decrease in perinatal mortality (early neonatal death—first seven days of life) in targeted hospitals.