Sultan foundation moves to end maternal mortality through data collection

 Worried by the increasing number of maternal deaths among women in Northern Nigeria, the Sultan Foundation for Peace and Development has converged in Kaduna for a 1- day Bi-Annual Review Meeting on Community Based Maternal and Perinatal Death Surveillance and Response Project (CBMPDSR) with a view to ending the trend through data collection.   Speaking […]

 Worried by the increasing number of maternal deaths among women in Northern Nigeria, the Sultan Foundation for Peace and Development has converged in Kaduna for a 1- day Bi-Annual Review Meeting on Community Based Maternal and Perinatal Death Surveillance and Response Project (CBMPDSR) with a view to ending the trend through data collection.

 

Speaking at the meeting on Monday in Kaduna, the Coordinator of the foundation, Malam Muhammad Aminu Inuwa said the aim of the meeting is to tackle the problem of maternal mortality bedeviling the region.

 

He said, “The project is aimed at collating data of women that die during the period they are carrying a pregnancy or when they are in labour, or when they have delivered at home. Data that is available now, is data from health facilities. Over 70 per cent of women deliver at home, so the death at home is much more by several percentages than the death in health facilities.

 

“What we want to do is to collect this data from the source, from the ward level, to the village level, to the district level up to the emirate level and up to the local government level where in the state now, they can be able to move this data collected to the foundation."

 

He said when the foundation receives the data, it will analyze it, look at the number of the population for each community that has submitted the data, correlate the percentages for each, identify the challenges and then we can discuss with the state at each level, highlighting the predominated issues and challenges being faced in each community so that they can plan for better health outcomes.

 

Representative of the United Nations Population Fund, Dr. Audu Alayande while highlighting some next steps said there is need for the project to learn from the dead to save lives in the future.

 

He also opined that there is need to link the information received with the facility and adhere to proper record keeping at the primary source with a view to ensuring the projects achieves its goal.

 

He emphasized that the project need to get to the root causes of maternal death from communities to be able to tackle the problem saying, “Decisions on where the woman will give are given at the family and community level.”

 

Resolutions of the October 2017 to June 2018 monthly data are expected at the end of the meeting.