Community Benefits Health project launched in Saawie
Ghana's efforts to reach the targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on maternal and child health may not have been very successful, but hope turned into joy for stakeholders when the Community Benefits Health (CBH) project was launched in the Upper West Region last Thursday.
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The gathering of politicians, health service providers, international bodies, non-governmental organisations, chiefs, community leaders and community dwellers in Saawie in the Jirapa District agreed that Ghana had focused on the MDGs on maternal and child health.
MDGs 4 and 5 require reduction of mortality rate among children under five years by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015, and then reduction of maternal mortality ratio by three-quarters between 1990 and 2015.
So when the Deputy Minister of the Upper West Region, Mr Abu Kabiebata Kansangbata, declared that: “Let us all remember that the future of Africa, Ghana and the Upper West Region resides in the belly of mothers,” it proved to be the endorsement for the CBH as a complementary effort for various interventions to reduce maternal and child mortality.
“Clearly, the recognition by all stakeholders to improve the health of children and mothers truly shows that we cannot continue to do business as usual if we have to save the lives of our mothers, babies and children from needless and preventable deaths,” Mr Kansangbata said at the launch of the project.
He said the CBH project in the Upper West Region: “will go a long way to complement the efforts of the government in providing quality and affordable health services to the citizenry.”
A number of global, regional and national commitments, including MDGs 4 and 5, call for a drastic reduction in child and maternal mortality by 2015, and the Deputy Minister said the United Nations’ campaign of “Every woman Every child” led by the UN Secretary-General and which seeks to intensify global and national efforts to achieve MDGs 4 and 5 is a laudable effort.
The CBH project initiated by ProNet North – a local non-governmental organisation with interest in maternal and child health, girl-child and disability education, and water and sanitation – consists of innovative interventions and strategies to address common barriers in order to improve access to maternal, newborn and child health services.
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Rather than the many monetary-based projects, the CBH is a community-driven innovation that encourages women to access antenatal care, supervised delivery of babies and post-natal care for both mothers and babies.
It is currently working in 51 communities across three districts that comprise 12 beneficiary communities in the Upper West Region.
According to the Director of ProNet North, Martin Dery, communities that attained set targets of the CBH would be entitled to a community project such as borehole, community transport or a dam for irrigation to be sponsored by ProNet, with support and sponsorship from international partners.
The project, according to Mr Dery, sought to achieve increased awareness and knowledge about the importance of accessing antenatal care, supervised delivery, post-natal care among women and community members in target districts.
The Upper West Regional Director of Health, Dr Abudulai A. Forgor, said the CBH was in line with the strategic direction of improving geographical access to health through the Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) programme.
He said the region had chalked up some successes in health, including increasing the CHPS zones to 241 from 197 in 2004, with the Japanese International Co-operation Agency (JICA) in the process of constructing 38 more compounds.
The programmes manager of United States-based Concern Worldwide, Jahera Otieno, said they looked forward to the outcome of CBH project with the hope that the target would be achieved at the end of the two-and-a-half years that the project was expected to last.