Family and Reproductive Health

Child and adolescent health

WHO in Nigeria is providing support for advocacy; development and implementation of policy and guidelines to deal with the diseases and conditions that represent the greatest health burden to children and adolescents; strengthening of national child health programmes; capacity building for implementation of cost effective interventions that focus on newborn, older children and adolescents and quality of care; increasing access of school aged children and adolescents to relevant information and services; complementary support to child and adolescent health by other areas of work (e.g. Malaria, NUT,STI &HIV,MPS) and partnership for synergy and impact.

WHO in collaboration with other partners in the National Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health supported Nigeria to develop the IMNCH Strategy. The strategy comprises intervention packages that address the main causes of deaths in pregnant women, newborns and children under the age of five years.

Studies of HIV in Nigeria have shown that children have poor access to ARV, it also showed that ART Services were skewed in favour of the adult population. One of the reasons for this is inadequate skills of health workers in identifying and managing children infected with HIV. WHO has therefore supported the development and implementation of training using an HIV Complementary Course for Integrated Management of Childhood Illness.

Reproductive health

Despite concerted efforts to reduce Maternal Mortality Ratio, the ratio remains high. High proportion of births is not attended by skilled health personnel; quality of health care is poor and utilisation of health services is very low including family spacing services.

WHO has provided technical and financial support to address key interlinked elements required to build the continuum of care. One of these is human resources development for maternal and neonatal health care. WHO has helped to build pre-service capacity for improving midwifery education and supported implementation of the Road Map for accelerating maternal and newborn mortality reduction. This aims to provide accessible, high quality, maternal and neonatal health (M&NH) care services by helping individuals, families and communities increase their control over maternal and neonatal health and by integration of other primary healthcare programmes with M&NH services.

Some specific projects supported by WHO include the training of National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) doctors on Emergency Obstetric and Neonatal Care (EmONC) in eight states across the geopolitical zones in Nigeria; supporting basic midwifery graduates to acquire additional skills in visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) prior to commencement of the compulsory one year rural posting; In 2007, as part of the Making Pregnancy Safer initiative, in Sagamu, Ogun State, 90 Midwives had refresher training on the use of partographs for monitoring/ managing labour and infection control/decontamination process.