Implementing a South African social innovation for maternal peer support in low resource settings in Sweden – an evaluation of the Mentor Mother program

Maternal and child health in Sweden is generally good, but unequal, largely due to the substantial differences in socio-economic status between children growing up in areas with a large proportion of foreign-born individuals and children growing up in areas with mostly native-born individuals. Home visiting programs with peer support have been introduced as a way to reach the most vulnerable populations. The Philani Mentor Mother program is one such program that has been implemented and proven effective in disadvantaged areas of South Africa. During 2021, a pilot of the model was implemented in two disadvantaged areas in Sweden as a method to improve maternal and child health. The purpose of the future project is to evaluate the process and effects of implementing the Philani Mentor Mother (MM) program, in a Swedish socio-economically disadvantaged context. This is envisioned to be done through a process evaluation of the implementation of the program, and effectiveness established in a quasi-experimental study with Sense of Coherence (SoC) amongst mothers. Evidence generated through this evaluation will inform implementation of this and similar programs – with the ultimate aim of improving maternal and child health – critical to the welfare society. The purpose of the planning grant is to enable workshops to plan a future evaluation of the project, and to determine the feasibility, acceptability and appropriateness of the intervention. The planning grant will be used for 1) financing meetings and workshops where we can plan for the implementation of the social innovation in detail, and 2) to fund a pilot study where interviews with mothers, Mentor Mothers, and key stakeholders will be conducted. In the pilot study we will also test the feasibility and process of measuring SoC when visiting BVC (child clinic) and draw learnings regarding how to best do this in the future project.