Nigeria’s maternal and infant mortality rate still remain high despite interventions. In this interview with WINIFRED OGBEBO, Nigeria’s country representative, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr Mairo Mandara shares on what is needed to bring the figures down.
What areas is the foundation looking at in your work in Nigeria?
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation right from the beginning is built on the principles of the fact that all lives have equal value therefore the work of the foundationis aimed at giving dignity to people who are poor. So the foundation works in various sectors to make sure that every human being have a reasonable health and they help themselves out of poverty. We also work on children because children are the most vulnerable. We work tomake sure that children have good health, we work in the area of immunization, pneumonia, diarrhea and diseases. We work in maternal health to make sure that pregnant women have pregnancy that is safe and they deliver safely. Where they choose to rest in between children, we support them to do that. We also support agriculture. We work very closely with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture to support the agricultural development agenda. We are in particular, trying to support Nigeria to be able to produce its own rice to feed itself. We are working very closely with Alhaji Aliko Dangote in the routine immunization programme. He has also shown a lot of interest in agriculture. So basically what we work in, are areas that a lot of poor people in the community are in need of.
Despite the several interventions, maternal and child mortality rate is still high. What do you think could bedone to bring the figure down?
I am a health expert. I specialize in obstetrics and gynaecology. The key to improving maternal and child health in Nigeria is basically primary health. I can assure you that if we pass the health bill, we have a significant or 0.5 or one per cent of our budget goes to the primary health care; I am not talking of teaching hospitals but primary health care centres. That is where children are taking when they have diarrhea. That’s where women go for antenatal. That’s where women go for delivery, to take their blood pressure and all. That’s where they go where all their basic health issuesare taken care of. So for me, there isneed to strengthen primary health care.Another thing to strengthen primary health care is making sure that we have adequate and quality manpower; our nurses and midwives are properly trained and they train to actually give good service. So if we could do this, I can assure that we’ll improve maternal and child health.
What specific interventions in primary health care do you think can bring positive results ?
I will start with the one thing we shouldn’t do; build clinics. We already have enough primary healthcare centres. We need to furnish and refurbish them so that they can become functional. We need to make sure that every primary healthcare centre has a nurse and a midwife that can do antenatal and deliver women. We need to make sure that our health care providers are retrained to be able to respect and give women dignity because a lot of women don’t like to go to hospital because they are disrespected. We will need the hospital to have some autonomy to be able to get some whatever they need like medicines, and so on and so forth. We are piloting strengthening routine immunization in Kano with Dangote Foundation. The Dangote Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Kano State government are doing something similar to primary health care under one roof, putting all the money together so that even a local government primary health care have an account and therefore they can access what they need. They don’t have to wait for full bureaucracy. So cut on bureaucracies, cut on middlemen; supplies through this, supplies through that and make sure that ourwomen and children have access to basic essentials. Things that kill women and children are things that are shaming; things like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia and these are things that can easily be eradicated.
In what ways is your organization trying to make an impact in maternal and child health in Nigeria?
We are doing it a number of ways. We believe that one of the reasons our leaders don’t make very critical decisions is because they don’t have data because if you don’t have data you make decisions arbitrarily. So we are supporting the Saving One Million to make sure that across the country, data is well collated and its used for decision making. We are supporting direct maternal and child health intervention in various states.Gombe is one example of a state that we are working on. We are working in diarrhea diseases and pneumonia in Benue, Kebbi and other states depending on what their needs are. If you go to states around the south west, we are heavy on agriculture-cassava. I am sure that you know that the yellow cassava is a programme we are supporting to make sure that cassava becomes an income generating route for the country.
How much is the timeline budget your foundation has for health?
With the existing programmes that are going on, the investment of the foundation in Nigeria is about $700m and our annual cheque is multi years because when you give a grant, the grant runs for a couple of years and the annual cheque that are written varies from year to year between a 140, 200,170. But the complete investment is about $700 million for a period of time between three to five years in various sectors.
Source: Leadership Newspaper
What areas is the foundation looking at in your work in Nigeria?
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation right from the beginning is built on the principles of the fact that all lives have equal value therefore the work of the foundationis aimed at giving dignity to people who are poor. So the foundation works in various sectors to make sure that every human being have a reasonable health and they help themselves out of poverty. We also work on children because children are the most vulnerable. We work tomake sure that children have good health, we work in the area of immunization, pneumonia, diarrhea and diseases. We work in maternal health to make sure that pregnant women have pregnancy that is safe and they deliver safely. Where they choose to rest in between children, we support them to do that. We also support agriculture. We work very closely with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture to support the agricultural development agenda. We are in particular, trying to support Nigeria to be able to produce its own rice to feed itself. We are working very closely with Alhaji Aliko Dangote in the routine immunization programme. He has also shown a lot of interest in agriculture. So basically what we work in, are areas that a lot of poor people in the community are in need of.
Despite the several interventions, maternal and child mortality rate is still high. What do you think could bedone to bring the figure down?
I am a health expert. I specialize in obstetrics and gynaecology. The key to improving maternal and child health in Nigeria is basically primary health. I can assure you that if we pass the health bill, we have a significant or 0.5 or one per cent of our budget goes to the primary health care; I am not talking of teaching hospitals but primary health care centres. That is where children are taking when they have diarrhea. That’s where women go for antenatal. That’s where women go for delivery, to take their blood pressure and all. That’s where they go where all their basic health issuesare taken care of. So for me, there isneed to strengthen primary health care.Another thing to strengthen primary health care is making sure that we have adequate and quality manpower; our nurses and midwives are properly trained and they train to actually give good service. So if we could do this, I can assure that we’ll improve maternal and child health.
What specific interventions in primary health care do you think can bring positive results ?
I will start with the one thing we shouldn’t do; build clinics. We already have enough primary healthcare centres. We need to furnish and refurbish them so that they can become functional. We need to make sure that every primary healthcare centre has a nurse and a midwife that can do antenatal and deliver women. We need to make sure that our health care providers are retrained to be able to respect and give women dignity because a lot of women don’t like to go to hospital because they are disrespected. We will need the hospital to have some autonomy to be able to get some whatever they need like medicines, and so on and so forth. We are piloting strengthening routine immunization in Kano with Dangote Foundation. The Dangote Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Kano State government are doing something similar to primary health care under one roof, putting all the money together so that even a local government primary health care have an account and therefore they can access what they need. They don’t have to wait for full bureaucracy. So cut on bureaucracies, cut on middlemen; supplies through this, supplies through that and make sure that ourwomen and children have access to basic essentials. Things that kill women and children are things that are shaming; things like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia and these are things that can easily be eradicated.
In what ways is your organization trying to make an impact in maternal and child health in Nigeria?
We are doing it a number of ways. We believe that one of the reasons our leaders don’t make very critical decisions is because they don’t have data because if you don’t have data you make decisions arbitrarily. So we are supporting the Saving One Million to make sure that across the country, data is well collated and its used for decision making. We are supporting direct maternal and child health intervention in various states.Gombe is one example of a state that we are working on. We are working in diarrhea diseases and pneumonia in Benue, Kebbi and other states depending on what their needs are. If you go to states around the south west, we are heavy on agriculture-cassava. I am sure that you know that the yellow cassava is a programme we are supporting to make sure that cassava becomes an income generating route for the country.
How much is the timeline budget your foundation has for health?
With the existing programmes that are going on, the investment of the foundation in Nigeria is about $700m and our annual cheque is multi years because when you give a grant, the grant runs for a couple of years and the annual cheque that are written varies from year to year between a 140, 200,170. But the complete investment is about $700 million for a period of time between three to five years in various sectors.
Source: Leadership Newspaper
No comments:
Post a Comment