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Every Woman Every Newborn EverywherE
Healthy Futures

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Zambia

Photo © 2022 UNICEF/ Kinny Siakachoma
Registered Nurse assisting a mother setup for Kangaroo Mother Care at the University Teaching Hospital.

Every Woman Every Newborn in Zambia

Download the full profile with additional key demographics, progress against milestones, and more.

This profile was developed in May 2023, using data from 2018-2023. 

Download the full Zambia profile

Photo © 2009 UNICEF/ Christine Nesbitt
Vincent Mumba, newly born, lies on his mother’s chest in the labour ward of the Chelstone Clinic. Martha Mumba, his mother, is HIV-positive and participates in the PMTCT programme at the clinic. Vincent will receive prophylactic ARVs twice a day for the first seven days after birth and, at six weeks, will be tested for HIV.

MNH Acceleration Plan highlights

In 2026, the priorities in Zambia’s MNH Acceleration Plan include: 

  • Scale up quality of care standards for maternal and newborn health by leveraging the country’s seven centres of excellence.
  • Implement the midwifery model of care.
  • Integrate services, with integrated reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health guidelines and a standard operating procedure for integrated service delivery. 
  • Improve the quality and use of data: increase the interoperability of data systems, use AI in forecasting commodities and equipment for maternal and newborn health, digitize the Maternal and Perinatal Death Surveillance and Response (MPDSR) system.
  • Strengthen the human resource information management system, to ensure more strategic deployment.
  • Unlock domestic funding and foreign catalytic funding to implement the integration of services with a focus on the health workforce. This should start with a deployment campaign and retention programme for unemployed midwives, neonatal nurses and neonatal medical officers. 
  • Focus on emergency obstetric and newborn care and geospatial mapping to optimize resource.

Photo © 2023 UNICEF/ Tiwine Muchipa
28 year old mother Mary Zulu with her newborn baby at St Francis Hospital Kangaroo Mother Care unit.

National mortality targets

Maternal
mortality ratio

100 per 100,000 live births
by 2026

Stillbirth
rate

12 per 1,000 live births
by 2026

Neonatal mortality rate

12 per 1,000 live births
by 2026

Progress to meet the national maternal, newborn mortality and stillbirth reduction targets

Photo © 2023 UNICEF/ Tiwine Muchipa
Mother Mary Zulu (28 years old) and Registered Nurse Faides Zulu (26 years old)

Progress to meet Every Woman Every Newborn Everywhere coverage targets

Photo © 2022 UNICEF/ Kinny Siakachoma
Kangaroo Mother Care

Quality of care in Zambia

As part of its efforts to reduce maternal and newborn mortality and stillbirths, Zambia is taking steps to improve the quality of maternal and newborn health. These include:

  • Build capacity of health care providers from hard to reach, prioritized facilities on post-partum haemorrhage prevention and management.
  • Conduct community meetings to review quality of care for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health
  • Finalize maternal and perinatal death surveillance and response (MPDSR) guidelines and training materials; Build capacity in MPDSR for neonatal intensive care units providers.

News and events

Lessons to end postpartum hemorrhage

June 10, 2026

First webinar in a four-part series sharing lessons from the Accelerating Measurable Progress and Leveraging Investments for Postpartum Hemorrhage Impact (AMPLI-PPHI) project. Organized by Jhpiego.

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Resources

See also: ‘Quality of Care standards for maternal and newborn care – Lessons learnt from the journey towards Centers of Excellence’,  the poster that the Zambia delegation presented at the International Maternal Newborn Health Conference 2026. 

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