FG urged to expand maternal, child health programme

The Federal Government has been urged to expand and institutionalise ongoing maternal and child health interventions following what the President of Rotary International, Francesco Arezzo, described as remarkable results recorded in Nigeria, saying the outcomes have surpassed initial projections and justify nationwide scale-up.

Arezzo spoke during his visit to the office of the Rotary Action Group on Reproductive Maternal and Child Health, where he reviewed the ongoing maternal and child health programmes in selected states.

“The first was a clear Rotary project, funded by Rotary, done by Rotarians, and already finished. “Now we find the best way to continue to have a result and to prove the result of the project. Now to go on.”

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Arezzo reiterated Rotary’s commitment to sustaining and scaling the gains of the ongoing maternal and child health program. “It is enough to show the results. The results are so good that everybody can understand that it is necessary for the community to continue on this path. We have only to work, and to work even better.”

Earlier, the National Coordinator of the Rotary Action Group for Reproductive, Maternal and Child Health (RMCH) Nigeria, Prof. Emmanuel Lufadeju, who was represented by Past District Governor Kazeem Mustapha, formally welcomed the Rotary president and introduced the national project team.

Mustapha traced the evolution of Rotary’s maternal and child health interventions in Nigeria, describing the current programme of scale as the product of decades of sustained engagement.

“In 1995, there was a Rotary matching grant project that addressed access to contraceptives. We called it child spacing,” he recalled.

According to him, the initiative increased family planning prevalence in project communities from three per cent to 27 per cent, a record he said was documented in medical literature.

He also referenced the Rotary fistula project between 2005 and 2008, during which hundreds of doctors were trained in vesicovaginal fistula repair across Kano, Kaduna and Katsina states, with international experts supporting local capacity building.

That intervention, he explained, later evolved into a quality assurance project in selected hospitals, where service standards improved by 50 per cent above the national average at the time.

“Rotary is a continuum. All our projects go in continuity, noting that the organisation subsequently expanded into data-driven maternal and perinatal death surveillance, working with the Federal Ministry of Health to integrate improved data systems nationwide.

“It is the part two of the project that is supposed to start now,” he said of the current programs of scale, which began in 2023 as a three-year intervention. “Within three years, we have even met the target for the entire three years.”

Providing figures to back the claims, Project Manager, Toyosi Adebabmbo, said the program began in 49 health facilities across four states in 2023 and has since expanded to 103 facilities nationwide.

He explained that the intervention operates on multiple pillars, including the provision of family planning and emergency obstetric commodities, capacity building, community engagement, and strengthened maternal and child death surveillance systems, among others.

“In the space of three years, we have been able to train more than 1,232 participants under emergency obstetric and neonatal care, 939 under respectful maternity care training, and 583 providers under family planning training,” Adebambo said.

He added that while the initial target was to conduct 200 community dialogues over three years, the team surpassed that figure, conducting 593 dialogues and reaching 79,703 people directly. Home visits also exceeded projections, rising from an initial target of 5,880 households, currently to 59,624.

According to him, the project set out to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality by 25 per cent across intervention sites but has achieved a 39 per cent reduction overall, with maternal and neonatal deaths dropping by 54 per cent in project locations.