UNICEF’s Climate-SMART Primary Health Care Facilities: UNICEF’s Agenda for Action provides the overarching vision and organizing framework for strengthening climate- and disaster-resilient and environmentally sustainable primary health care facilities (PHCFs). The Agenda is organized around five S.M.A.R.T. dimensions—Sustainable practices, Managed risks, Adaptive infrastructure, Resilient workforce and Technology-enabled systems—and 15 facility-level criteria describing the conditions and capacities needed to maintain safe, equitable and continuous services under changing climate and environmental conditions.
This Technical Compendium of Practical Measures for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health is the practical companion to the Agenda. It translates the Climate-SMART facility-level criteria into infrastructure, environmental-service, technology and operational options that can be considered according to local hazards, facility conditions, service needs, available resources, and implementation, operation and maintenance capacity.
The measures included in this Compendium represent an initial structured compilation rather than an exhaustive or definitive list. The Compendium is intended to evolve as part of the Climate-SMART agenda, incorporating and refining practical measures as new evidence, technical guidance, technologies and implementation experience become available. This evolving approach is intended to keep the resource responsive to changing climate and environmental risks, PHC needs and lessons emerging from implementation in different contexts.
A substantial body of guidance already addresses safe, climate-resilient and environmentally sustainable health care facilities. However, relevant measures are dispersed across health, WASH, engineering, architecture, infrastructure, energy and hazard-specific guidance. Many resources address health facilities broadly, focus primarily on hospitals, or are written for specialist technical audiences. Relatively few organize practical facility-level options in a format specifically oriented towards primary health care in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and fewer still consider their application to the requirements of maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) services.
The added value of the Compendium is therefore to bring these dispersed measures into a common and comparable PHCF-oriented format, with particular attention to resource-constrained settings and the conditions required for safe and continuous MNCH service delivery. These include reliable water and sanitation, energy, thermal safety, indoor air quality, infection prevention and control, safe physical access, functioning equipment and continuity of essential supplies.
