Mamprugu Moaduri District makes steady progress reducing maternal mortality

The Mamprugu Moaduri District of the Northern Region is making steady progress in reducing maternal mortality. 

The district, popularly known as “overseas” due to its distance from the Regional capital Tamale, has scored zero in the maternal mortality rate in the last three years. 

Between 2013 and 2014 however, the district recorded over one hundred and eighty maternal deaths annually, making it one of the highest in the Northern Region. 

In 2016, NORSAAC in collaboration with Plan Ghana, started implementing the "Strengthening Health Outcomes for Women and Children (SHOW) project in the district. 

According to the Programmes Manager for NORSAAC, Hajia Hafsa Sey Sumani, the program aims to improve the health status of women and children through increased support from male family members especially the husband. 

“We have for example the daddy’s club, where men in the community are grouped and sensitized to support their wives especially during pregnancy” she said. 

She said pregnant women are often overburdened with household chores and this sometimes leads to health complications. 

“She is heavily pregnant, and has to walk from Yirangu to Kubori, even though the man has a motorbike parked in the house. Our goal is to change this trend to get men to help, and this is working,” she added. 

A member of the Daddy’s Club at Isisia, a farming community in the district, Mutari Ibrahim, said in an interview with Radio Ghana, explained that “members of the club now support one another through a village savings and loans scheme and whenever one of them needs financial support to take the pregnant wife to hospital, the group lends the person money.” 

Over the last twelve months, all pregnant women at Yirangu another farming community in the area, delivered at the health facility. 

A visit to the Kubori Health Center showed an increase in the number of deliveries in the last twelve months. 

According to the midwife for the Kubori Health Center Harry Alhassan “they have never recorded forty deliveries, but now we are recording t least forty six deliveries every month.”

Story by GBC's Murtala Issah

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