Kangaroo Mother Care

Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) for preterm and low-birthweight babies. KMC involves continuous contact between a newborn and a mother’s chest (or another caregiver when not possible with the mother), alongside exclusive feeding with breastmilk.

KMC offers numerous benefits, including improved neonatal survival, weight gain, and reduced rates of neonatal infection. It may also improve maternal-infant bonding, as well as enhancing long-term child development.

Despite strong evidence supporting KMC, many implementation gaps remain. Very few countries track KMC coverage within their health systems.

Implementing high-quality KMC requires:

• Starting the KMC position early and ensuring more time is allowed for it every day;
• Optimising newborn nutrition; and
• Ensuring systematic follow-up for at risk neonates, especially as length of stay is very short in many African newborn units.

What does the KMC workstream do?

The KMC workstream brings together clinicians, researchers, and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) across Africa to pursue:

• Identifying priority implementation research questions for KMC, with a particular focus on African contexts;
• Codeveloping practical tools such as feasible ways to measure KMC duration in routine systems; and
• Enabling ECRs and others to publish their findings for others to learn from.

We will also promote the dissemination of KMC tools on the Newborn Toolkit.

Our expected KMC outputs

We will deliver the following outputs in collaboration with our ECRs:

• How to better measure and promote the longer duration of skin-to-skin care;
• Exploring digital innovations to support KMC monitoring;
• Methods of integrating and strengthening family-centred approaches, including parental perspective; and
• Exploring the mental health benefits of KMC for mothers.