” I choose to be a Nurse Midwife because it’s one profession that can continue to spark my innovative mind to deal with many aspects of patient care especially among women and children”

Chinomso Ibe is a Nurse/Midwife founder of Traffina Foundation for Community Health (TFCH) in Nigeria and a Fellow of Maternal health Program with the Maternal Health Task Force at Harvard School of public Health and Institute of International Education USA. She reports on recent activities :

Since 2014, Connecting Nurses, Sanofi and the Millennia2025 Foundation WeObservatory have recorgnised Traffina Foundation for Community Health (TFCH) efforts on Maternal and Child Health, and we have continued to make great impacts in our rural communities supporting our pregnant women and babies survive during childbirth with the production and distribution of our Mom and Newborn Delivery Kits. We keep improving every day on our package and can’t wait to hit a Million distribution !

In 2019, we have started a Facebook live « Mama & Pikin Matter” a live series on Maternal and Child Health to engage our online communities and build there knowledge on how to reduce preventable pregnancy and child birth complications and death. Different topics on Maternal health are discussed every Sunday, having our audience ask questions and share real life childbirth scenarios. We were able to educate more than 20,000 community members. Dr Uche Anyanwagu and I anchored this program. We took a break and will continue with it soon.

We have also continued our rural community Safe Motherhood program’s and Ante-natal care programs teaching pregnant women and families in different local languages on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle during pregnancy, Childbirth and beyond.  

Our work has gone viral inspiring so many other young people who have become and extension of our work in there rural communities. We have more volunteers across Nigerian rural communities who are truly a blessing to us , with full dedication to help reduce the Maternal mortality and morbidity rate in our country. We are really building Maternal health young champions, which is a continuation of the impact the Maternal health Task Force fellowship made in me. 

Right now in the Covid 19 pandemic, we are providing palliative support to pregnant women and breastfeeding mother’s across 5 states in Nigeria. Knowing the impact of lockdown on pregnant women, breastfeeding mother’s and there babies, we have so far distributed food to 200 women and there families, through our donors who remained anonymous.

We have new patners too Henderson Hill’s Baptist Church Edmond US who are supporting our Mom and Newborn Delivery Kits, we will share pictures when we complete there project. Also we have individuals who are supporting the distribution of the kits to there communties and we are thankful for that. 

As the pandemic affected the rural communities much , more women are giving birth at home more , but with our intervention we are providing as many birth supplies as possible to our women and also at the health centers.

I am also working as a Frontline at this point and using this opportunity to say a big thank you to my amazing team for all there hard work.

We are looking forward to more support to provide more Birth kits to our women as both the fear of being infected by the virus and no availability of Birth supplies have left them to give birth at home more.

We are not giving up, we will continue to save lives !

More here : https://traffinafoundationfch.org/blog/

http://www.m2025-weobservatory.org/save-our-mothers.html