Afrigather 
Ladies’s Day 2024: Nigeria’s Common Well being and Lowering Maternal Mortality, by Maureen Ideozu
As we have fun Worldwide Ladies’s Day in 2024 underneath the theme “Spend money on girls: Speed up progress,” it’s crucial to replicate on the progress made in the direction of guaranteeing girls’s well being and well-being worldwide. At Seconds for Good (S4G) we view this yr’s theme as underscoring the vital significance of investing in girls and women as catalysts for constructive change, significantly within the context of Nigeria’s Common Well being Protection Initiative (NUHCI) and its implications for decreasing maternal mortality charges within the nation.
Nigeria, like many different nations, faces important challenges in offering accessible and high quality healthcare providers to its residents, significantly girls. Nevertheless, amidst these challenges lies a possibility for collective motion and advocacy in the direction of reaching higher well being outcomes for ladies throughout Nigeria.
When President Ahmed Bola Tinubu on 12 December 2023 launched the Nigeria Well being Sector Renewal Funding Initiative, because the world commemorated the Common Well being Protection Day, we have been elated as a result of the initiative represents a daring step in the direction of guaranteeing that every one Nigerians, no matter their socio-economic standing, have entry to important healthcare providers with out monetary hardship. NUHCI encompasses a spread of providers, together with maternal and baby well being, household planning, immunization, and entry to important medicines. Prioritizing NUHCI, would imply that Nigeria acknowledges the basic proper of each citizen to entry high quality healthcare providers, a vital component in reaching gender equality and girls’s empowerment.
Learn Additionally:
One of the vital urgent points in Nigeria’s healthcare system is the unacceptably excessive maternal mortality charge. Being out within the area, offering cellular ante-natal care to girls in Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camp and interesting with girls in semi-urban communities in addition to staff in native well being services, we’ve gathered first-hand information and knowledge on how dire our scenario is. So, regardless of progress lately, Nigeria nonetheless accounts for a big proportion of world maternal deaths. Components contributing to maternal mortality embody restricted entry to expert beginning attendants, insufficient healthcare services, cultural practices, and socio-economic disparities. Addressing these challenges requires a multi-faceted strategy that integrates healthcare providers, schooling, neighborhood engagement, and coverage reform.
Nigeria’s UHC initiative holds immense promise for bettering maternal well being outcomes throughout the nation. By increasing entry to maternal healthcare providers, together with prenatal care, expert beginning attendance, emergency obstetric care, and postnatal help, NUHCI has the potential to considerably cut back maternal mortality charges.
Furthermore, it can be certain that girls obtain well timed and applicable healthcare interventions all through their being pregnant and childbirth, thereby mitigating the chance of problems and preventable deaths. The response from girls throughout our outreach programmes present that they’re keen to attend medical services when the situations are useful. Some are deterred largely as a consequence of financial causes equivalent to lack of ability to afford transportation, price of supply packs, remedy, remedy and absence of certified nurses and medical doctors.
Name to Motion: As we commemorate Worldwide Ladies’s Day 2024, allow us to reaffirm our dedication to advancing girls’s well being and rights in Nigeria. It’s crucial that stakeholders in any respect ranges—authorities, healthcare suppliers, civil society organizations, and communities—collaborate successfully to fast-track the implementation of the Nigerian Common Well being Protection Initiative. There must be elevated funding in healthcare infrastructure, human sources, and well being education schemes tailor-made to the wants of girls and women. Within the meantime, the prevailing services needs to be sources with certified personnel, tools and medicine. Authorities wants to speak an urgency in guaranteeing residents obtain good service supply in all places it commits its funds.
Moreover, selling gender-sensitive insurance policies and eliminating boundaries to girls’s entry to healthcare providers are important steps in the direction of reaching sustainable progress in decreasing maternal mortality. Empowering girls to make knowledgeable choices about their well being, together with household planning and reproductive selections, and providing alternatives for inclusion in financial actions is integral to reaching constructive well being outcomes for moms and their youngsters.
I conclude by inviting us on Worldwide Ladies’s Day 2024, to have fun the resilience, energy, and contributions of girls in Nigeria and all over the world. By championing Nigeria’s Common Well being Protection Initiative and prioritizing maternal well being, we are able to create a future the place each girl has the chance to steer a wholesome and fulfilling life. Collectively, allow us to work in the direction of a Nigeria the place no girl dies from preventable causes associated to being pregnant and childbirth—a Nigeria the place girls’s well being and well-being are safeguarded as a basic human proper.
Maureen Ideozu is the Founder/Government Director of Seconds for Good (S4G). She birthed S4G as a approach to give again, having survived two among the many prime causes of maternal mortality. S4G is a non-profit organisation that seeks to help efforts to considerably cut back incidents of maternal mortality in Nigeria by means of soliciting broad-based help to implement measurable and sustainable initiatives in Nigerian communities.
