Venture Strategies Innovations (VSI)

Venture Strategies Innovations (VSI) is a nonprofit organization committed to improving women’s health in developing countries by creating access to effective and affordable technologies on a large scale. 

VSI focuses on reducing barriers to access and enhancing human capacity to bring about sustainable improvements in health. VSI’s innovative approach involves partnerships that build upon existing infrastructure, resources, and markets. 

VSI’s largest safe motherhood program increases access to and availability of misoprostol for the prevention and treatment of postpartum hemorrhage (PPH). Due to its tremendous promise to save women’s lives—especially those of women who deliver outside of health facilities—VSI provides technical and financial assistance to governments; nonprofit organizations; and professional medical associations and businesses, including pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors, to work together to bring misoprostol tablets closer to women who need them.

VSI does this by:

  • Ensuring high-quality misoprostol is registered for use in PPH and sale in developing countries.
  • Negotiating low prices.
  • Planning for the tablets' availability through both commercial and public channels, and catalyzing initial sales and distribution.
  • Developing policies to enable the use of misoprostol for PPH by multiple levels of health care provider, and to encourage sustained supply (national clinical guidelines and essential medicines lists).
  • Training providers (doctors, nurses, midwives, community health workers, and traditional birth attendants) on the use of misoprostol for PPH.
  • Conducting research with the Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley, to show the feasibility of alternative modes of distributing misoprostol at the community level.

VSI’s PPH Program: http://www.vsinnovations.org/pph

Where VSI works: http://www.vsinnovations.org/where-we-work.html

Safe Motherhood Resources: http://www.vsinnovations.org/resources.html