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A health worker counsels a young woman about family planning options at a mobile clinic in a remote area of Benin. Photo by Trevor Snapp for IntraHealth International.
Through a new contract, IntraHealth International will support the West African Health Organization (WAHO) to accelerate its health workforce interventions in West Africa under the World Bank’s Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD) project. To start, we will provide technical assistance to develop a regional policy, guidelines, and roadmap to strengthen the rural pipeline of health workers in West Africa who can provide high-quality reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and nutrition (RMNCNH) health services, and to build the capacity of nursing and midwifery preservice training institutions.
WAHO is charged with safeguarding the health of people in the sub-region through initiation and harmonization of policies, pooling of resources, and cooperation of Member States. SWEDD is an innovative project that empowers women and adolescent girls in Western and Central Africa to improve their access to quality reproductive and maternal and child health services.
“We don’t have enough health workers to provide equitable access to RMNCNH services, especially in rural areas.”
“Here in West Africa, we still have some of the highest rates of maternal and child deaths in the world, and some of the lowest rates of family planning uptake,” says Cheick Touré, IntraHealth’s West Africa Regional Director based in Mali. “We don’t have enough health workers to provide equitable access to RMNCNH services, especially in rural and remote areas. All countries in the region have shortages of nurses, midwives, and other professions, and are on the WHO’s Health Workforce Support and Safeguards List.”
IntraHealth has worked in over 100 countries to develop and strengthen their health workforces to meet community health needs. We improve health worker education and training, optimize health workforce policy, conduct human resources for health (HRH) situation analyses to identify and address gaps in health workforce staffing, and more.
At Vicenta Maria School of Ségou in Mali, a teacher demonstrates active management of the third stage of labor. IntraHealth’s Classroom to Care project helps 21 health schools in Mali, Niger, and Senegal provide high-quality training to meet local needs. Photo by Amadou Iam Diallo for IntraHealth International.
A student at Vicenta Maria School of Ségou in Mali practices what she just learned. By the end of the five-year project, C2C aims to have 9,720 students benefiting from quality training. Photo by Amadou Iam Diallo for IntraHealth International.
IntraHealth is currently implementing the Classroom to Care (C2C) project, funded by Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, which is strengthening capacities of nursing and midwifery schools in Mali, Niger, and Senegal to sustainably increase the number of qualified, well-trained nurses and midwives who can serve rural communities. C2C is adapting competency-based curricula to local needs, creating modern skills labs for practical training, developing eLearning platforms, and achieving accreditation under WAHO standards. Lessons learned from C2C will be used to support additional training institutions identified for support under the SWEDD project.
For the next three months, IntraHealth will boost WAHO’s activities under SWEDD’s Component 2, focused on strengthening regional capacity for adolescent-friendly services and improving the availability of RMNCNH products, as well as skilled health workers in RMNCNH at the community level. We will:
- Develop a regional policy, guidelines, and roadmap for the implementation of rural health workforce pipeline strategies.
- Conduct an analysis of nursing and midwifery schools in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Gambia and Mauritania and propose a plan to reinforce the training, infrastructure, and clinical practicum sites.
- Assist training institutions and internship sites in the process of accreditation and regulation of nursing and midwifery professions, following WAHO standards.
- Support WAHO’s experts working to operationalize the regional eLearning platform for the Nursing and Midwifery Program.
- Finalize and validate the basic and specialist training curricula for nurses and midwives in West Africa, emphasizing evidence-based best practices and client-friendly service provision.
- Provide a training-of-trainers program for experts and course leaders in each country.
IntraHealth looks forward to supporting additional health workforce interventions of WAHO.