Provide Lifesaving Kits for 10000 women in Nigeria

Dear Friends, I am excited to provide you with an update on the project you have been supporting for close to 2 years now. The Lifesaving Intervention project was launched in 2020 in 3 communities (Kabri, chana and Kara) Sardauna LGA. With the support of donors via GlobalGiving, we expanded this project to additional 8 communities in Wase, Plateau state. The recent funding from GlobalGiving enabled us to scale up this project to additional 10 communities in Gombe northeast Nigeria. The project is currently ongoing in 21 remote communities across Nigeria's northeast and northcentral. This project supports pregnant women with clean birth kits to ensure clean and safe delivery, and we train birth attendants on basic lifesaving skills to support pregnant women. We also support pregnant women with penatal medicines and micronutrients to ensure healthy pregnancy. To date, we have distributed 855 birth kits saving 855 mothers with their newborn babies. We have trained 120 home health volunteers (birth attendants), and we have distributed over 100,000 doses of prenatal micronutrients to pregnant women. Through this project we have also dewormed over 50,000 under-five children and have also supported them with vitamin A supplements to ensure strong immunity and good vision. In order to better support this project, this year we introduced over 200 community health workers in our project areas to an SMS-based, free-for-use mobile technology to promote improved maternal health practices in remote communities. The mHealth technology, otherwise called the critical healthcare information integration network (CHIIN) is designed and deployed by a US-based nonprofit organization in collaboration with Rural Health Mission Nigeria to help community health workers provide high-quality healthcare in remote communities. The CHIIN platform is an SMS-based, free-for-use mHealth medical reference tool that gives CHWs access to relevant medical information based on important considerations and best practices in sexual health and family planning, pregnancy, labor and delivery, and postnatal mother and infant care, without the need to use the internet. In addition, the tool contains a database of information on the risk factors, symptoms, diagnoses, management strategy, drug information, and complications of nearly 100 context-relevant infectious and noncommunicable diseases. This technology is that it does not require the internet nor smartphone to function. It works on any mobile phone that can send and receive SMS even in the remotest community. It is easy to use by CHWs and users are not charged for sending and receiving any information on this platform. This technology eliminates the cost of data to browse the internet, the time taken searching for information on practice manuals or guides. It’s a friendly job aid for community health practitioners to provide high-quality care in low-resource settings. With this support from the CHIIN team, it’s believed that the lifesaving intervention project will double its impact and it will also accelerate its broader vision of reducing maternal, child, and neonatal mortality in remote communities in Nigeria. This year, we have supported 500 pregnant women with the lifesaving birth kits and we hope to support 1000 pregnant women by December 2021. We have trained 70 home health volunteers and we are hopeful to train 200 by December 2021. Without your support, all these would't have been possible and I very hopeful for your continues support of this project.

Links:

• How mHealth technology is supporting lifesaving project
• Lifesaving project reported by a top Nigeria media