The White Ribbon Alliance in collaboration with partners has launched the “What Women Want” campaign aimed at directly hearing from women and girls across Nigeria about how they define quality maternal and reproductive healthcare.
“What Women Want” is a global advocacy campaign to provide quality maternal and reproductive healthcare for women and girls and strengthen health systems.
Speaking at the launch in Abuja, the National Coordinator, White Ribbon Alliance in Nigeria, Tonte Ibraye, said, “The campaign sets out to gather survey data from women and girls in Nigeria about their top priority for quality maternal and reproductive health services.”
According to Ibraye, “This campaign is not just for only one organization, it is for everybody to join if they want to get feedback from women and girls about what they want to see in a primary healthcare centre when they visit a health facility.”
Already, several national and global organisations, including the Wellbeing Foundation, have signed on to the campaign.
Ibraye said, “We are hoping to launch the campaign in all the states and we have invited a lot of other organisations to adopt this campaign and implement it at different levels. Thus, organisations in several other areas will also launch the campaign in those areas and get the information that we need so that we can analyse them and share the results with decision makers and stakeholders at all levels.”
“ We are going to do all our best to ensure that we track the resources and also find out from the women if they are having the benefits of the investments that government is making in health,” Ibraye added.
On her part, the Wife of Nigeria Senate President and President of the Wellbeing Foundation, Toyin Saraki, who was represented at the launch by the Vice-President of Wellbeing Foundation who is also a Special Adviser to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Amy Oyekunle, said the Welling Foundation is focused on changing the narrative of maternal and child mortality through programmes like the Mama Care Antenatal and Post Natal Education Programme.
She said, “Throughout the years we have been working, we have seen that maternal mortality is on the increase but where women have well-equipped facilities and trained and skilled health workers, there is a change in those indicators as they have less mortality rate.”
Meanwhile some of the pregnant and nursing mothers called on the government to waive all forms of hospital charges imposed on pregnant women during delivery as this has kept most poor women away from hospital deliveries.
Mrs Juliet Lazarus said, “For me, during delivery, the care I received was good but for others, for example, the person I gave birth with, the care was not good because she had no money to buy the hospital requirements for delivery and for that, she nearly died to extent that she had to use some of the delivery items I brought.”
“This campaign is very good for women because if the government will listen to our voices, they will help us. I remember some years ago, delivery was completely free, they will treat you well and even give you packages to go home with, which we really appreciated.”
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