Telecoms operator, Airtel Nigeria, has
renewed its partnership with the Millennium Promise and the Earth
Institute at Columbia University, United States of America, to provide
quality health care to pregnant women, nursing mothers and children
under five years in Pampaida, Kaduna State, under the Millennium
Villages Project.
The MVP, an initiative of The Earth
Institute, is a science-based bottom-up approach to lifting rural
villages out of the poverty trap that afflicts more than a billion
people worldwide.
The community-driven initiative currently
operates in 12 sites in 10 sub-Saharan African countries where it
tackles challenges related to health and nutrition, education,
agriculture, gender equality and other vital issues.
The Managing Director/Chief Executive
Officer of Airtel Nigeria, Mr. Segun Ogunsanya, said that under the new
agreement with Millennium Promise, the telecoms company was leveraging
on its 3.75G network to deploy a sophisticated mobile phone platform
dubbed CommCare to help support community health workers and home-based
care providers to provide better, more efficient health care to the
targeted beneficiaries.
Ogunsanya said, “The CommCare platform
will also aid better supervision and coordination of community health
programmes, providing a guide to community health workers and assisting
them with an electronic questionnaire to collate data on the pregnancy,
birth and condition of the infants as well as wellbeing of mothers.
“The
system will also guide community health workers to refer infants or
mothers that are in need of medical attention, thus addressing one of
the key barriers to reducing neonatal and maternal mortality.”
Ogunsanya said Airtel was committed to
providing communications solutions “that will help to improve the
quality of life of people in Pampaida.”
“We are creating enormous opportunities
for these communities in Northern Nigeria and we expect the impact of
this project to outlive our generation.
“At Airtel Nigeria, we are convinced that
the attendant benefits and potential of this project will fast-track
transformation of the lives of many of the residents of Pampaida from
their current status,” he said.
Source: Punchng
