Stakeholder Engagement Visits: Jan-Feb 2023
The Maternal Health Initiative’s (MHI) team had the pleasure of conducting a month-long visit to Sierra Leone and Ghana across January and February 2023. This trip provided the opportunity for MHI to engage with a broad range of key stakeholders as the team lays the groundwork for a program of preliminary research and initial pilot testing of our contraceptive counselling training through March and April.
Sierra Leone
The trip began with around 10 days in Freetown, a city with beautiful coastal views and the capital of Sierra Leone. Freetown is the hub of much of the international development work across Sierra Leone, providing a convenient opportunity to meet with the leadership teams of multiple major international NGOs. Meeting with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and Planned Parenthood Sierra Leone (PPASL) gave us clear insight into the challenges of ensuring comprehensive access to family planning across the country.
A visit to the Aberdeen Women’s Centre, a dedicated maternal hospital funded by the Fistula Foundation, was a fantastic opportunity to speak to providers of family planning services directly. Here, we were able to witness the complexity of providing high-quality service to a continual flow of clients and the strategies healthcare workers employ to overcome these difficulties.
While in Freetown, we were also kindly invited to speak to the Program Manager for Reproductive Health work for the Government of Sierra Leone. This initial meeting lays the foundation for future collaboration and helps MHI ensure that our work is truly providing additional value, addressing gaps in existing work by the government and other actors.
Venturing beyond Freetown, we travelled to the regional city of Bo to continue engaging with a variety of key stakeholders. In Bo, we had the pleasure of engaging with the regional team for Marie Stopes International, researchers from Njala University, and the fantastic team delivering high quality care at the Haikal clinic. Learning directly from midwives and clinicians here about the approaches they take to providing family planning services was particularly insightful.
Travelling around Bo also brought the team our first experience of the bright, three-wheeled keke’s that from an integral part of transport in the country. The open sides offer a welcome breeze in the humidity and heat of Sierra Leone’s dry season.
Overall, our time in Sierra Leone was illuminating in understanding the specific successes and challenges of family provision in the country and the specific avenues along which MHI might best provide unique value. Our visit also proved fruitful in meeting with multiple potential partner organisations who can help MHI carry out preliminary research and testing work in the country, with whom we are currently finalising understandings of how we could proceed.
Ghana
With a firm intention of maximising the value of our trip, we also spent the best part of two weeks in Ghana. This provided the opportunity to build on the connections and understanding from an initial scoping visit to the country in October 2022.
Thanks to an enhanced understanding of the Ghanaian healthcare system and work of key organisations from that trip, we were able to focus our efforts on engaging local NGOs who we may be able to partner with.
Based initially in Osu, a busy suburb towards the west of Accra’s city centre, we met with some of the leading organisations implementing work to improve the quality and reach of reproductive health services across Ghana. Engaging in detailed discussion with these organisations provided fantastic insight around how best to implement an initial program of work, and how to design it with a view to scaling its value in partnership with the national government.
We are particularly excited about carrying out work in the north of Ghana and were also able to travel to Tamale, capital of the Northern Region, for four or five days. Here, we met with some fantastic local organisations and were able to set in motion plans to conduct preliminary work across several regional clinics and hospitals in the coming weeks.
Our time in Ghana has left us feeling energised about the prospects of delivering a truly impactful and scalable counselling training. We’re now hard at work building on this momentum and carrying it through into designing and running our first training workshops in the coming weeks.
We’re excited to continue this journey and to share it with you as we look to maximise the value MHI can bring to women and children across sub-Saharan Africa. As ever, if you have any thoughts or questions about our work, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.