Most maternal health investment focuses on clinical touchpoints – antenatal visits, health facilities and delivery – yet much of pregnancy is lived between these interactions. This paper examines how supported maternal self-care can extend the value of maternal health investment beyond the clinic, enabling women to manage their health between visits while remaining connected to professional care.
Part of UNU-CPR’s Self-Care Pathways to Financing Health and Development series, the paper examines the emerging evidence for the fiscal and economic returns of maternal self-care. It considers interventions including multiple micronutrient supplementation, digital tools, community health workers and women’s groups, and home monitoring and self-management.
Building on the framework established in the series’ main paper, the analysis traces returns through three pathways: improving health-system value and containing costs by preventing or detecting complications earlier; strengthening household financial security by reducing travel, treatment and other out-of-pocket costs; and supporting longer-term economic growth through improved maternal survival, early-life health and future productivity.
Examples from Ethiopia and India show how these approaches can be integrated into existing maternal health systems. Ethiopia demonstrates how routine antenatal care can support sustained use of multiple micronutrient supplements, while programmes in India show how community health workers, digital tools and women’s groups can extend support beyond health facilities and, in some cases, reduce household and wider societal costs.
The paper emphasizes that self-care should complement rather than replace health services. Realizing its benefits requires governments to finance the full care pathway – including commodities, counselling, follow-up, referral and support for accessing clinical care – rather than transferring costs and risks to women and households. It also calls for stronger measurement of health-system, household and longer-term economic returns, alongside deliberate efforts to ensure interventions reach women facing poverty, distance, disability and other barriers to care.
