Improving access to health services for women and children: Community health workers get involved.
With funding from the Government of Korea, 103 community health workers from Garoua Boulai and Meiganga have were to improve health services for households in the East and Adamaoua Regions.
Mohamadou Laminou is a Community Health Worker (CHW) from the Garoua Boulai district in the East Region. He has benefited from a refresher training in mother and childcare.
“We needed this training to help the women in our community take good care of themselves and their babies,” he says, expressing his gratitude to the trainers.
In this health district, several flaws were detected in the management of mother and child health and well-being.
The trend observed shows that women were not adopting good practices for themselves and their children, especially in terms of hygiene and attendance at health facilities for childbirth and vaccination follow-up, among others.
“In the community, women prefer to give birth at home, without any medical follow-up,” Mohamadou reveals.
It was therefore necessary to step up awareness-raising in the community to encourage people to adopt good hygiene practices and attend health facilities regularly to ensure proper care for newborns and mothers.
A fresh impetus
UNICEF, in partnership with the Government of Korea, then implemented a project to improve access to quality services for women and their children in the Garoua Boulai and Meiganga health districts. This project includes the training of more than 100 community health workers to raise community awareness and ensure compliance with good health and hygiene practices.
It focused on strengthening the capacities of these agents in various aspects of mother and childcare, such as the practice of the kangaroo method, good hygiene and sanitation practices in the community, attendance at health facilities, and immunization, among others.
“During this training, we learned a lot of things that will help our community, such as how to use and clean latrines, and how to manage household waste to keep our environment clean and prevent disease,” says Mohamadou. “Thanks to this training, we have been galvanized and boosted to better sensitize households. We are now able to detect and monitor pregnant women in the community, raise their awareness and refer them to hospital for proper care,” he continues.
The training was an opportunity to acquire methods for raising community awareness in the context of the targeted Regions. The retrained Community Health Workers received a fresh impetus to raise awareness in households and encourage the community to adopt good practices, thereby contributing to the well-being of mothers and children. The training was therefore beneficial for these health workers, who are now equipped to contribute actively to positive change in their community and to the well-being of mothers and children.
