Reducing maternal mortality amongst rural women in Jigawa, Kano
Rural women in five states in the northern part of the country have been given assurance of having safe child births. The states are: Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Yobe and Zamfara. This is as a result of a partnership between Women for Health (W4H), a UKaid funded nongovernmental organization and the respective state governments to train female health workers for deployment to rural communities.
Interacting with newsmen in Kano recently, the National Programme Director of Women for Health, Dr. Fatima Adamu, expressed concern over dearth of man power in the rural health facilities.
She said birth complications or eventual deaths of women and children in the communities were preventable.
She observed that majority of health workers in the states lived in urban areas even when their places of assignment are in rural communities thereby depriving rural women of professional care during pregnancy and child birth.
‘’We recognized that in all the five states where we are working, majority of their health workers are in the urban areas, in the state capitals. In fact, more than 8090% of midwives in these states are resident in state capitals. It is very common therefore to have a whole local government without a single midwife, and the implication is that women in rural areas are giving birth without birth attendants which means if there is any complication there’s nobody to attend to her,’’ she said.
She blamed the development for the high infant and maternal mortality rate in the zones.
When our reporter visited some of the communities and schools that benefitted from the intervention, they expressed hope for better days.
Maryam Ahmadu is a resident of Kunchi Local Government Area, Kano who lost her first child and almost died due to prolonged labour in the hands of a traditional birth attendant in the village.
She said: “Though the community has a big primary healthcare facility, for about four to five years now, there has been no trained midwives to receive deliveries at there.”
She said when some were posted to the village, they only stayed for a few months and then “run back to the city leaving expectant women at the mercy of Allah and in the hands of traditional birth attendants.”
Similarly, Malam Nasiru Yunusa Kunchi expressed delight over the W4H’s initiative in training rural young women to take charge of local challenges in their communities.
He described it as a ‘double edged sword’ for fighting not only health concerns but also the evil of unemployment and education of the girl-child in the north.
“I am encouraged by this initiative especially as it relates to the issue of girl- child education. We do not take girl-child education seriously perhaps that explains why we are facing a lot of difficulties. We don’t have women to attend to our wives in our health facilities, and in schools no teachers, but with this partnership I believe there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Speaking to Daily Trust at Kunchi, Hadiza Abdullahi, one of the pioneer products of W4H’s health workers training scheme, currently working as a professional midwife at PHC Kunchi, said she was inspired into the profession because of the difficulties her people have been facing over the years when it came to child delivery.
She said anytime a woman was in labour, especially during late hours, it used to be very difficult for her to access professional care givers as most of the birth attendants lived in the city.