The Lancet 2023 Series on Breastfeeding will launch on Feb. 8, 2023, and on Feb. 9, Alive & Thrive is proud to co-sponsor a dissemination and discussion event on the series in Southeast Asia. Learn more about both events.

Despite WHO recommendations, many COVID-19 maternal and newborn care guidelines failed to recommend skin-to-skin contact, rooming-in, and breastfeeding as the standard of care. Irregular guidance updates and the discordant, but influential, guidance from the United States Centers for Disease Control may have been contributory. It appeared that once recommendations were made for separation or against breastfeeding they were difficult to reverse. In the absence of quality evidence on necessity, recommendations against breastfeeding should not be made in disease epidemics.

Some mothers who would like to continue breastfeeding are forced to stop so that they can return to work. Workplace Lactation Support programs are an effective way to address this problem. This short video introduces the key elements of a successful program -- Space, Time, and Support -- as they were developed by ofi, a major food ingredients company, in 11 of its factories in Viet Nam. Alive & Thrive supported ofi's program, which is helping thousands of working mothers provide the best start to life for their babies.

Three posters on mass media costing, scaling up maternal nutrition, and school-based nutrition highlight results from some of Alive & Thrive's implementation research in Africa and Asia. They were shared at the 2022 SBCC Summit in Marrakech, Morocco, in December.

This analysis documents the financial costs and budgetary needs for implementing mass media components of large-scale breastfeeding programs, providing annual costs, cost structures, and coverage achieved through mass media interventions in four low- and middle-income countries.

The scale-up of a package of maternal nutrition interventions in five of Ethiopia’s 10 regions is progressing well, stakeholders said during recent interviews. The package was developed with Alive & Thrive technical assistance.