Outreach: targeting high-risk women through community partnerships

The need for community-based preventive intervention is driven by the ineffectiveness and the costliness of traditional approaches. We argue that community outreach efforts should be characterized by three components: 1) careful mapping of high-risk areas, 2) developing partnerships with trusted community institutions within areas of high risk, and 3) developing a portfolio of institutional partners that maximize the penetration of high-risk populations. The analysis of these high-risk contexts redirects the focus from individuals to institutional structures. Gaining a greater understanding of how impoverished women relate to formal institutions is critical to the primary goal of reducing unnecessary deaths.