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In 2020, an estimated 2.4 million neonates lost their lives, and an additional 2 million were stillborn. The ten countries in the world with the highest estimated neonatal mortality rate (NMR) -all above 33 per 1000 live births -have had an average annual reduction in NMR of 1.3% in the last 30 years. This decline is significantly less than the world average of 2.6% and less than all of sub-Saharan Africa at 1.7% [1,2].The Every Newborn Action Plan (ENAP) is a globally-endorsed strategy for ending preventable newborn deaths that supports the Sustainable Development Goal 3.2 of an NMR of less than 12 per 1000 in every country by 2030 [3]. For this to happen, interventions are needed jointly at the community, primary, and secondary health care level, with a strong emphasis on continuity of care in reproductive-maternal-newborn-child-adolescence (RMNCA) programming.The consortium of Helping Newborns Survive and Helping Mothers survive has been or is in the process of developing several well-structured, tested, and efficient interventions at all care levels in low-and lower-middleincome countries (LLMIC). However, the most complex building block has received little attention until recently: the facility-based care of small and sick newborns who are not possible to stabilize with basic care [4]. Mainly due to substandard intrapartum care in many LLMIC, there is a disproportionally large need for such neonatal treatments in the first days after birth [5]. For example, in Nairobi County in Kenya, a relatively well-functioning capital city, estimates indicate that one in five newborns needs inpatient care above what can be handled in a maternity ward [6]. The ENAP proposed that, by 2020, at least 50% of this category of newborns should receive level 2 inpatient care, in-between basic and neonatal intensive care (Figure 1) [3].Recent assessments in 5 LLMIC show that only 66% of all facilities offering skilled labour care had performed some kind of resuscitation of a newborn,