Nigeria Health Watch
By Anthonia Obokoh (Lead Writer) The maternal mortality rate in Nigeria is 512 deaths per 100,000 live births, and according to the 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS), 61 percent of live births do not take place in a health facility. About 20% of global maternal deaths occur in Nigeria and more women especially […]
“This article was produced in collaboration with Maternal Figures, a database of maternal health interventions implemented in Nigeria.” At Amorji Nike Primary Healthcare Centre [PHC] in Enugu East local government council, more than a dozen women with their children wrapped in their arms sit patiently in a waiting room at the premises. The women came […]
Editor’s Note: The Obijackson Foundation in December 2019 threw a week-long Christmas festival, which included a Christmas party for 7,000 children in Anambra. EpiAFRIC team members, Chibuike Alagboso, Aloysius Ugwu and Thelma Thomas, who attended the event, write about how the Foundation’s has fared running the Children’s Hospital and the opportunities for potential partnerships to […]
When Dr. Bello Olubenga started out his career as a gynaecologist at Maitama District Hospital in Abuja, helping mothers deliver healthy babies was his biggest motivation for putting in the long hours required for his job. This was not always the case, sometimes the hospital lost a mother or a baby. The common causes for […]
Ensuring that people everywhere have access to affordable, quality healthcare at the point of need, is an imperative that requires urgent action. Access is one of the three important components of Universal Health Coverage (UHC). The global health and development community marked UHC Day on December 12, bringing attention to the important role of quality […]
On a cold drizzling morning in Fuka village, Munya local government area (LGA), Niger State, three-day-old Oscar has just been bathed and dressed by his grandmother. He looks healthy in his sweater and lies comfortably in his mother’s arms. Twenty-three-year-old Mary, his mother, had just applied chlorhexidine gel around his unbiblical cord area. “It is […]
Ever wondered how a Nigerian startup came to be listed as one of Time Magazine’s 50 Genius Companies of 2018, standing alongside global giants like Amazon, Apple, Merck and AirBnB? The company’s founders did this by studying a traditional cultural motherhood practice found in most parts of Nigeria… and they then digitised it. When a […]
Solving many of the challenges in health is a complex process and nobody can claim to have a silver bullet for any one problem. It requires gaining a good contextual understanding of a problem and those it affects, coming up with a possible solution, testing and implementing the solution and scaling up if it works. If […]
In Nigeria, exclusive breastfeeding is still not widely adopted. According to the 2016-2017 National Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) Report, only 23.7% of infants aged five months and below are exclusively breastfed with only 15.3% of all children receiving the minimum acceptable diet. This is an abysmal figure when compared to the exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) […]
As part of efforts to hold government accountable to its promises through enhanced inclusiveness, transparency and accountability in governance, the development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC) in partnership with the Women in Media (WIM) under the Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health At Scale, PACFaH@Scale is organized a two day retreat for the […]
The year 2017 rounds up this week, and we at Nigeria Health Watch reflect on what has been a challenging year for the Nigerian health sector. There have been set-backs, but also notable triumphs, and below are prominent themes that dominated the Nigerian health sector in 2017. The critical role of leadership Leadership has always […]
A few weeks ago, my colleague Chioma and I volunteered with Pro Health International to provide free medical care for IDPs in three camps in Abuja. Pro Health International provides “quality and quantitative health care and hope to the poor and less privileged in rural areas of Africa at little or no cost to the […]
On the front cover of Save the Children’s latest report “”Ending newborn deaths” is a newborn baby at a clinic in northern Nigeria. But this is about the only positive thing in the report out of our beloved country. The rest makes for very painful reading; The NGO, “Save the Children” invited different stakeholders working on […]