Nigeria

The Room Was Full to Support and Protect Vulnerable Children in Nigeria

Sarah Dwyer — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 14:02:16 +0000

Nigeria SSW report slideshow

Jan 20, 2015 by Carol Bales

Click to view slideshow.

In December, the government of Nigeria launched a key report aimed at protecting orphans and vulnerable children in its Federal Capital Territory. IntraHealth’s USAID-funded CapacityPlus project contributed to the report and participated in the event.

The Child Protection System Strengthening Mapping and Assessment Report for Federal Capital Territory looks at the state’s child protection risks and gaps, and examines continuum of care, accountability mechanisms, and resource mobilization of the state’s existing child protection system. It ultimately aims to strengthen delivery of quality child protection services in the state.

According to the report, there are 17.5 million orphans and vulnerable children in Nigeria. It’s estimated that 39% of children ages 5-14 are engaged in child labor; approximately 40% of children do not attend primary school; and as many as 40% of children may have been trafficked.

Author's name:

Carol Bales

Publication Date:

January 2015

Supporting Lifelong Learning among Nigerian Community Health Workers through a Targeted Assessment of Training Needs

Sarah Dwyer — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 18:07:08 +0000

Lifelong learning is the ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons. It is not confined to the classroom but takes place throughout life and in a range of situations. To develop and maintain the competencies needed to deliver high-quality services, health workers must be lifelong learners. Formal continuing education and training activities can support lifelong learning. Yet to be effective, they must target identified gaps between each worker’s current knowledge and skills and what is actually needed on the job. Training needs assessments provide information to target learning activities toward identified competency gaps and learning needs of specific health workers.

In Nigeria, CapacityPlus collaborated with the Community Health Practitioners Registration Board of Nigeria (CHPRBN) and the Federal Ministry of Health to assess the training needs of community health workers in the South-South region. The assessment focused on globally accepted knowledge, skills, and attitudes for community health practitioners in nine competency domains:

Author's name:

Rebecca Bailey and Joseph Eton

Publication Date:

December 2014

Why Nigeria’s Response to Ebola Succeeded

Sarah Dwyer — Thu, 09 Oct 2014 13:12:56 +0000

A man arrived by plane in Lagos on July 20. He fell ill at the airport and was taken to a hospital. Shortly afterward he was diagnosed with Ebola, the first case in Nigeria.

Lagos is an enormous city of 22 million, and public-sector doctors were on strike. The number of lives at risk was terrifying.

“If Ebola hits Lagos, we're in real trouble,” warned Laurie Garrett in Foreign Policy, and added that her colleague John Campbell predicted it “would instantly transform this situation into a worldwide crisis.”

Yet August 29 marked the last reported case of Ebola in the country, and the number of confirmed cases topped out at 20, with eight deaths. The incubation period for those who had contact with Ebola patients ended on October 2. After 42 days with no new cases, Nigeria will be officially free of Ebola.

Author's name:

Sarah Dwyer

Publication Date:

October 2014

Out of Midwifery School and Hard at Work

Sarah Dwyer — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 13:46:28 +0000

This post originally appeared on IntraHealth International’s Tumblr.

Now that smile is contagious!

Rosaline Osanebi delivered these beautiful twins during her clinical rotation at the Zuma Memorial School of Midwifery in Edo State, Nigeria.

She’s one of 2,065 students who earned scholarships from CapacityPlus.

Author's name:

Carol Bales

Publication Date:

July 2014

The Winds of Change

Carol Bales — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 20:18:58 +0000

The Harmattan is a dry and dusty wind that blows right over Nigeria from the Sahara Desert into the Gulf of Guinea. During my recent trip to Abuja, the Harmattan was nearly ending and the dust was beginning to lift its cloud over the city, making way for clear and sunny days. I thought this was a perfect analogy for CapacityPlus’s work supporting preservice education for midwifery and community health workers in the country.

Just outside of Abuja at the School of Midwifery FCT Gwagalada, I had the opportunity to meet with 19 midwifery students, each a beneficiary of a scholarship provided by CapacityPlus to assist with tuition fees for their third and final year of training.

Author's name:

Amanda Puckett

Publication Date:

March 2014

Picturing Our Work: Delivering Over a Thousand Textbooks for Students in Nigeria

Carol Bales — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 15:12:29 +0000

Last month, CapacityPlus delivered much-needed textbooks and other educational materials to 11 schools of health technology and midwifery in Nigeria. Here I am shaking hands with Sampson Tita, the principal of a school of health technology in Nassarawa State. We had just opened boxes and boxes containing brand new books for use by students like these that are studying to become community health extension workers.

Author's name:

Joseph Eton

Publication Date:

January 2014

A Conversation with a Nigerian Nurse and Administrator Who Uses iHRIS

Carol Bales — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 19:26:27 +0000

This is an excerpt of a post that originally appeared on the iHRIS Blog.

Oluchukwu Ifele is a nurse by training, with a focus on nursing and midwifery. She’s now part of the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria, where she supervises the clerical staff who use the open source iHRIS software to track licensure information for Nigerian-trained nurses and midwives. I recently interviewed her to find out more about her work and how she benefits from using iHRIS.

Author's name:

Adam Gori, guest blogger

Publication Date:

January 2014

New Software Application Tracks Health Workforce Training

Carol Bales — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:37:57 +0000

This post was originally published on VITAL, the blog of IntraHealth International.

The global agenda is clear: universal health coverage. And as we heard at the Third Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, a strong, qualified health workforce is essential to achieving this goal.

But how do we create a strong global health workforce that can provide care to all seven billion of us? One of the keys is information—reliable, accurate information on health workers’ skills and qualifications.

Data on individual health workers’ training can be hard to come by. The information is often scattered in paper files, buried in obscure databases, or simply does not exist. To help address this challenge, IntraHealth’s iHRIS team in Uganda customized the open source iHRIS software to create iHRIS Train, a whole new application that captures and reports health worker training data.

Author's name:

Amanda Puckett

Publication Date:

January 2014

Nigeria Minister of Health Cites Importance of Health Workforce Issues

Carol Bales — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 10:27:45 +0000

Recently at the 2nd National HRH conference in Nigeria, with the theme “Universal Health Coverage in Nigeria: Role of Human Resources for Health,” the Federal Minister of Health, Professor C.O. Onyebuchi Chukwu, celebrated CapacityPlus for our good works in the area of health systems strengthening.

Author's name:

Joseph Eton

Publication Date:

October 2013

“We Have Done It Before, We Are Doing It Now, and We Will Do It Again”: CapacityPlus Awards Scholarships to Midwifery Students

Carol Bales — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 14:27:15 +0000

“We Have Done It Before, We Are Doing It Now, and We Will Do It Again”: CapacityPlus Awards Scholarships to Midwifery Students

“We have done it before, we are doing it now, and we will do it again,” announced Samuel Ngobua, chief of party for CapacityPlus/Nigeria, during a scholarship award ceremony on August 13. The event marked the second scholarship award—this time to 1,200 midwifery students from 54 schools in 30 states!

The scholarship scheme is one of the interventions CapacityPlus is implementing to address low production of quality midwives and community health workers in Nigeria. A baseline assessment in September 2012 showed that financial difficulties caused a high number of students to drop out of their programs while other students pulled out until they had funds to continue. In February 2013, CapacityPlus awarded the first scholarships to 874 students in their final year of studying to become midwives and community health extension workers in two states, Edo and Benue.

Author's name:

Pius Emmanuel Uwamanua

Publication Date:

August 2013

“He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best”: Moving Past Obstacles to Strengthen the Health Workforce in Nigeria

Carol Bales — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 15:22:24 +0000

My recent journey to Imo State, Nigeria parallels the risks and difficulties that health workers endure while working in challenging environments in developing countries—yet with persistence and commitment, they are able to create structures for delivering quality health services.

In my case, I was traveling with a group to further efforts to strengthen human resources for health (HRH) at the state level. My team set out on a journey that would ordinarily take less than two hours but instead turned into 24 hours.

Author's name:

Agbonkhese Oaiya

Publication Date:

July 2013

Picturing Our Work: Teaching Teachers to Save Lives

Devika Chawla — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 16:02:07 +0000

For millions of women in the world, giving birth is one of the biggest threats to their lives. Nigeria has one of the highest maternal mortality ratios—approximately 630 women die for every 100,000 births. Having a trained health worker present during the birth can make the difference between life and death for both the mother and the baby. But the challenge lies in ensuring that health workers are present, ready, connected, and safe.

CapacityPlus’s recent work in Nigeria focuses on ensuring health workers are “ready,” meaning that they have the necessary motivation, competencies, and support to meet the needs of their clients and communities. When the CapacityPlus team asked faculty and administrators at schools of midwifery and health technology how the project could support them, the most common answer was, “Train our teachers.”

Author's name:

Devika Chawla with Heather Ross

Publication Date:

July 2013

Answering the Call for More Nigerian Midwives

Carol Bales — Thu, 30 May 2013 17:59:21 +0000

“The world needs more midwives now more than ever,” said the Honorable Minister of Health of Nigeria, Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate. On May 6, Pate was joined by stakeholders and international development partners, including CapacityPlus/Nigeria’s Chief of Party Sam Ngobua, to celebrate the 2013 International Day of Midwives.

Hosted by the National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives and the Commission for Professional Midwives of Nigeria, the celebration featured the Honorable Minister of Health Pate, who encouraged women to take up the profession of midwifery and develop interests in maternal advocacy at all levels.

Author's name:

Amanda Puckett with Samuel Ngobua

Publication Date:

May 2013

Health Is Wealth

Carol Bales — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:14:43 +0000

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog.

Meet three men in Africa who share two key beliefs: access to health care for all people is vital, and healthy people build strong economies.

Samuel Nugblega of the Christian Health Association of Ghana believes in helping his country develop economically by improving the health of Ghanaians. “Health is fundamental to everything,” he says. “And from Ghana, we say health creates wealth.” To bring this about, Samuel works to support the health workers who deliver vital services.

Author's name:

Carol Bales and Sarah Dwyer

Publication Date:

April 2013

Picturing Our Work: Scaling Up Health Worker Education

Carol Bales — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 19:28:30 +0000

What’s the woman in this photo smiling about? Where in the world was it taken?

Author's name:

Carol Bales and Heather Ross

Publication Date:

April 2013