Adara Partners: The Power of Partnership

Female Leader, Audette Exel AO, Founder & Chair Adara Group

Adara Partners New South Wales, Australia.

They bridge world

Adara Partners is a top-tier corporate advisory firm, providing independent financial and strategic advice and complex commercial problem-solving services to leading Australian companies. 100% of profits generated on assignments go to directly benefit women and children living in extreme poverty. The Adara Panel Member structure brings together some of Australia’s most senior leaders in financial services.

As Adara Panel Members, they provide wise counsel and senior advice to clients, with their time, effort, and expertise donated to Adara Partners. This allows for the maximum generation of profits to support people living in poverty in the developing world. Adara Panel Members undertake this role separately from their other professional and home firm commitments, which remain unchanged.

The Adara Group was founded in 1998 by Audette Exel AO to bridge the worlds of business and international development, with a focus on serving vulnerable communities in some of the world’s most remote places. Despite gains made in reducing maternal and infant mortality across the globe, rates in low resource settings are still unacceptably high. 99% of all maternal and infant deaths occur in low-resource countries. Most could be prevented. Adara’s global health work focuses on ending the preventable deaths of women, children, adolescents, and newborns.

Since 1998, Adara’s work has focused on strengthening Maternal Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) services in Uganda. Working in partnership with Kiwoko Hospital, a non-profit hospital in central Uganda that serves a catchment area of one million people, they have demonstrated the impact of an integrated model of care. This encompasses training, clinical support, and high-standard facility and community-based care across antenatal, maternity, and neonatal intensive care.

Since 2009, more than 10,500 of the tiniest newborns have received expert care in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Kiwoko and close to 40,000 women have given birth safely.

They have demonstrated that newborn deaths can be dramatically reduced in facilities and communities with the right holistic care. At their Centre of Excellence, more than 85% of sick and vulnerable newborns survived in 2020. Since 2009, NICU admissions rose by 93% and maternal deaths as a proportion of hospital births fell by 25% in the same period. They have been able to reach thousands of women through our community outreach (safe motherhood) clinics and have followed up on over 94% of our high-risk infants in communities by a network of trained community health volunteers in Uganda.

The Power of Partnership – Adara’s Corporate Partners

Adara is looking to expand their high-impact maternal and newborn care model to other health facilities across Uganda serving populations with high numbers of newborn deaths. This will encompass multiple components including adequate infrastructure, equipment, staffing, and biomedical support. It also includes training and mentoring from a strong team of Ugandan specialists, alongside strong quality improvement systems.

They are also proposing an open-access, online ‘knowledge sharing’ platform to facilitate best practices among partners and encourage further replication of the model to other low-resource settings. They are committed to sharing our learnings and this model to save many more lives. Adara Partners shows they can work hand in hand. Don’t think of business as the enemy — think of it as a potential strategic partner.

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