* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Amina Aminu is service quality improvement and reproductive health advisor at the Partnership for Transforming Health Systems Phase 2 funded by Britain's Department for International Development. The opinions expressed are her own.
On International Women's Day, it is worth pausing to reflect that for hundreds of thousands of women and girls worldwide even in the 21st century, pregnancy and childbirth is still fraught with danger.
Access to skilled birth attendance during delivery is one of the most critical interventions to reduce maternal mortality as the majority of obstetric problems occur during delivery and the immediate post-partum period.
Yet, in developing countries such as Nigeria, women’s access to skilled birth attendance is very low and only about 39 percent of births are assisted by skilled health workers (National Population Commission, 2009).
About 545 women die per 100,000 live births in Nigeria and this constitutes about 10 percent of maternal deaths worldwide.
In response to this, the Partnership for Transforming Health Systems Phase 2 (PATHS2) project funded by Britain's Department for International Development (DFID) is supporting the Nigerian government to implement health-system strengthening interventions including recruitment and training of health care workers to improve maternal newborn and child health in the country.
As part of the key interventions implemented to support this objective, PATHS2 introduced a competency based in-service training programme for Midwives and Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs) in the five project states.
This training on advanced life saving skills, is targeted at midwives and CHEWs that are most often the only available health care providers in primary health care centres in rural Nigeria.
The training involves building the clinical skills and competencies of these health workers to manage common obstetric and early neonatal problems while identifying and referring more complicated cases to a higher level health facility in a timely manner.
In order to support the five PATHS2 states (Jigawa, Enugu, Kaduna, Kano and Lagos) to ensure continuous availability of skilled health workers in rural communities, a training of trainers was conducted to build capacity of midwives that will cascade the training down to CHEWs and other midwives working in the community.
These trainings focused on skills acquisition in managing the most common problems of labour, delivery, immediate post-partum and early neonatal periods.
Though the initial part of the training was rather intensive to ensure in-depth practical exposure, skills acquisition and development, the trainers, midwives and CHEWs were very glad they were part of a process that will improve the lives of underserved women and children in rural communities in the five states and should ultimately reduce the toll of maternal and neo-natal mortality in the five states.
