AMURT provides the rural population with health and family planning education through village meetings, counselling of all newly booked woman in ANC, and during immunization, community based family planning and intrapartum counselling programs. The education is conducted by our trained Family Planning Focal Persons and by our facility based midwives. One of the positive outcomes is that the community has more awareness and acceptance of the health benefits for women of child spacing.
AMURT is making health care accessible and affordable in a country where 19% of all global maternal deaths occur and 1 in 10 children won’t reach their 5th birthday.
AMURT Nigeria has been setting up rural health centres in some of the poorest, most remote communities of Ebonyi State, for the last 11 years. To date over twenty-three thousand (23,000) babies have been born in our health centers.
AMURT has pioneered a new decentralized model of primary healthcare where the local community initiate, manage and take ownership of the health centers in partnership with AMURT and the government. The majority of staff in each health center come from the local community. In this partnership model, community mobilization and capacity building have been at the heart of the project. Through monitoring, discipline and a cooperative approach, the AMURT assisted health centers have achieved a high level of self-reliance.
AMURT understands that optimal health is also determined by social and economic factors, and access to clean water, hence AMURT undertakes the following programs as part of its approach:
- A scholarship program that gives talented youth opportunities to become qualified health workers, thereby transforming their lives;
- A water and sanitation program that brings boreholes to communities with no access to safe water, along with training of WASHCOMs (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Committees)
- An economic empowerment program that gives opportunities for widows and women who are sole breadwinners in their families to start their own businesses through cooperatively managed revolving credit schemes.
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In 2018, AMURT Nigeria provided support for 40 children’s surgeries, many of them lifesaving interventions. We took seven hydrocephalus/spina bifida cases to UNTH Enugu for surgery. In addition, AMURT assisted in surgeries ranging from incarcerated hernias to intestinal blockages, amputations and cyst removals.
In 2020, we recorded nine maternal deaths inside our project areas. This gives us a maternal mortality rate of 192 deaths per 100,000 live births. The last Nigerian national rate is 917 deaths per 100,000 live births (WHO, June 2018. Eleven of the seventeen maternal deaths were women from outside our project areas. The number of complications and “near misses” (meaning the mother was very close to death) successfully managed in the health centers, or with AMURT support at referral center, confirm that many lives were saved. AMURT reviews every maternal mortality during monthly medical team meetings to learn lessons and make changes to improve the quality of care.
In the rural areas, when medical emergencies occur, transport is hard to find. Therefore, AMURT has provided six health centres with ambulances and drivers on call around the clock.