Smiles and joy finally return to the faces of pregnant women, lactating mothers, children and the aged in Koinadugu district after the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) provided them with 50kilo Voltage Amps (KVA) generator to solve their long standing electricity saga in the hospital.
Koinadugu District comprises of eleven (11) chiefdoms believed to be one of the biggest districts in the country with 72 Peripheral Health Units (PHUs) but accessing health centres in the district is very difficult coupled with bad road network, hilly and wild forested areas with absolutely no vehicles to ply most chiefdoms.
The district is presently in dire need of rehabilitation of the existing health centres and construction of more PHUs in hard to reach communities because residents in those remote places have been delivering their babies with support from the Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) as a result of non-availability of PHUs.
Despite interventions by Government and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the TBAs are directly involved in home delivering of pregnant women and in the absent of a health centre, especially in hard-to-reach communities, the traditional mothers have always been heroines as most children were safely delivered by them.
This, among many reasons, saw the Government through the Decentralized Service Delivery Programme disbursing grant to the Koinadugu District Council for the construction of Under-Five and EPI Units and the rehabilitation of the Koinadugu District Medical Stores in Wara-Wara Yagala Chiefdom.
In an exclusive interview with the Chief Administrator (CA) of Koinadugu district council, Sahr Emmanuel Yambasu told Awoko Newspaper that, “We are indeed in dire need of the construction and rehabilitation projects which upon completion will have an administrative building with offices and a conference hall,” he confirmed.
Mr. Yambasu went on, “We have also engaged our partners on how the health system in this part of the country will be upgraded from the PHUs to the BeaMoc centres because as council we had paid for young men and women from the district that are presently doing nursing courses whom after their courses will come back to help boost the health system especially in hard-to-reach communities,” he maintained.
The CA said they are grateful to Medicos and SNAP, their International partners for supporting them and revealed that his council has also engaged Medicine San Frontier (MSF) for their supports to the district but pointed out that they are hopeful of receiving positive message from them. He said they are grateful to UNDP for answering to their cry by providing 50KVA generator that is presently supplying electricity to the entire hospital as repairs to old solar system is on-going by council.
By Mohamed Kabba
Thursday November 19, 2015
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