Insufficient reductions in maternal and neonatal deaths and stillbirths in the past decade are a threat to achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 3. Overcoming the knowledge-do gap to ensure implementation of known evidence-based intervention during the intrapartum period – the period from onset of labour to immediately after childbirth – has the potential to avert at least 2.5 million deaths in mothers and their offspring annually. Our ALERT approach targets this period and will develop and evaluate a multifaceted health system intervention to strengthen the implementation of evidence-based interventions and responsive care in Sub-Saharan African hospitals, where 40-50% of all births in the region take place. The ALERT intervention will include four main components: i) end-user participation through narratives of women, families and midwifery providers to ensure co-design of the intervention; ii) competency-based training; iii) quality improvement, supported by data from a clinical perinatal e-registry; iv) empowerment and leadership mentoring of maternity unit leaders complemented by district based bi-annual coordination and accountability meetings. We will apply a gender lens to explore constraints in intrapartum care in the context of the multidisciplinary teams providing maternity care. Repositioning midwifery with its preventive, promotive and curative aspects is a cross-cutting theme. We will evaluate the intervention through a stepped-wedge design, the primary outcome being in-facility perinatal (stillbirths and early neonatal) mortality. Our nested realist process evaluation will help to understand what works, for whom and under which condition. An economic evaluation will report on scalability and costs. Our research aims to inform programming for the Sustainable Development Goals and Every Women Every Child Agendas of the United Nations to support Universal Health Coverage and patient-centred care which will be relevant beyond the project focus

ENBEL will support EU policy making by bringing together leaders in climate change and health research. We do so by coordinating a network of major international health and climate research projects under the Belmont Forum’s Collaborative Research Action (CRA), Societal Challenge 1 and 5 of EU’s Horizon 2020, and other national and international funding schemes. The network will develop evidence syntheses and co-produce with stakeholders a series of tailor-made knowledge products. The project will engage with EU policy advisors to translate science into policies that help shape low-carbon economies and build climate resilience in member countries while supporting EU diplomacy and development strategies. The overall concept of ENBEL is a bottom-up approach to networking and cooperation across the often separate worlds of climate and health research communities. This can have major impacts on knowledge production and policies. ENBEL brings together a consortium whose work generates actionable knowledge on how climate change-health risks will develop under global warming, what are the social costs and effective, cost-efficient and equitable mitigation and adaptation strategies. ENBEL focuses on three major climate change related health hazards: environmental and occupational heat, air pollution (particularly from wildfires) and climate-sensitive infectious diseases, with specific attention given to high risk groups and populations within Europe, and in Africa/Asia-Pacific region. ENBEL will support a knowledge management platform of EU funded research on climate change and health is two ways: A) build and manage a web-based knowledge platform of health impact of climate change by using innovative tools such as video, photos, maps and infographics; B) connect to existing and recognised knowledge platforms.Through our partners in low-and middle-income countries (LMIC), ENBEL will support, strengthen and establish channels for collaboration and capacity-building in LMIC.