Willows Foundation: Touching the lives of women
Sakina still vividly recollects her life-changing encounter with a young woman who knocked on the doors of her Ashaiman home almost six years ago.
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Recalling every detail of her experience, Sakina, a 35-year-old proprietress of a popular local restaurant, was battling with reproductive issues until the woman walked through her doors.
Not knowing how to prevent unplanned pregnancies, she, within five years of marriage, had already produced three children. Child rearing had become her main task and this was taking a toll on her economic activity.
She was deeply worried. Many of the numerous clients had stopped patronising her once vibrant restaurant because she could not personally run the business due to frequent childbirth.
Relations who offered to help run the business did not have “the special touch” that drew the numerous clients to the restaurant and Sakina could see her business falling apart.
She recalls with a broad smile the visitor who walked into her compound one mid-morning in September 2007, while she was bathing her 18-month-old toddler. She introduced herself as a field educator of a project which aims to provide information on reproductive health and increase women’s utilisation of existing family planning and other reproductive health services.
By the time the woman left her compound, Sakina had been registered as a project beneficiary, and had been educated on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies by using contraceptives and referred to a health facility of her choice where she could get the service.
Many years after, during which Sakina had follow-up visits by the project field educator, she is now back to her booming trade, a happy woman, enjoying her sex life without any fear of getting pregnant and her three children growing up healthily.
The lives of numerous women in Ghana have been touched by the project which was implemented by Willows Foundation, a US registered NGO, in partnership with local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) including the Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana, (PPAG) and the Centre for the Development of People (CEDEP).
The activities of Willows Foundation began in Ghana with the inception of the Reducing Maternal Mortality and Morbidity programme (R3M) in 2006, which has the goal to contribute to the achievement of Millennium Development Goal (MDG5), which is to improve maternal health.
The R3M consortium members comprising EngenderHealth, Ipas, Marie Stopes International, Population Council and Willows Foundation work in partnership with the Ghana Health Service to decrease maternal mortality due to unsafe abortion by increasing access to family planning and comprehensive abortion care.
Willows Foundation is responsible for the community-based behaviour change component (BCRH). Willows Foundation uses the Behaviour Change for Reproductive Health (BCRH) model to change the reproductive behaviour of women, specifically those with low levels of education and income in urban settings, to help them lead healthier reproductive lives and achieve their reproductive goals.
At the initial stages, the Foundation partnered the PPAG and CEDEP to implement the model in Tema and Ashaiman. After training to build their capacities, staff of the two organisations began community education, information and referral services in September 2007 and continued to the end of July 2011.
Active Field Educators registered a total of 99,545 women out of which 67,224 were visited and given information. The number of women who also received Reproductive Health (RH) services was 19,769. The project further recorded an increase of 19,250 modern contraceptive method users, and by the end of the 46-month project period, the baseline Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) of 11 per cent in the project zone had increased to 33.9 per cent.
Willows Foundation expanded the project to Nima & Maamobi in the first half of 2010. Out of an estimated project population of 20,000 women of reproductive age, 17,502 have been registered. Out of this number 1,914 women received reproductive health services from health institutions.
“During the 22 months of community education and referrals, the project has already achieved nearly 21 per cent contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR), from the baseline data of 9.9 per cent,” said Ms Valerie Gueye, Country Programme Coordinator of Willows Foundation.
She said the project worked closely with the Ghana Health Service (GHS), particularly service providers in the GHS facilities, and “this is very important to us as the providers give us feedback on how the volunteers are working.
One special thing about this programme, Ms Gueye said, was that it was changing behaviour from within the community using community-based workers who were working hard to make the change.
In addition, the women are also followed up and provided support. “If they are referred for services we go back to find out if they had the service and if they have questions,” Ms Gueye stated.
“Because we work in the community we get to know the needs of individual women. We know their background and develop the communication for that woman and not the community.
Everybody has an individual need. We hear what the women’s fears are and the field educators are trained to deal with the issues and get the women to understand that they are myths and misconceptions,” she said.
In 2012, a new project was established in Central Kumasi in the Ashanti Region, with Willows Foundation fully responsible for direct implementation of BCRH activities.
The Project Manager of the Kumasi project, Mr Alexis Ayelepuni, said the objective of the project was to register 30,000 women in 12 communities. The communities are Aboabo, Alarbar, Akwatia Line, Asawase, Yelewa, Adukrom, Sepe Buokrom, Sawaba, Akrem, Tafo Zongo, Moshie Zongo and Sabon Zongo.
Mr Ayelepuni indicated that majority of the people in these communities had low levels of income and education and the areas were also so densely populated that the project had already registered 31,000 women within the ages 15 and 49, exceeding its target.
“We are now waiting to train with counselling skills so the registered women would be visited individually and provided with information on reproductive health,” he added.
Mrs Charity Awuah-Darkey, a Deputy Director of Nursing Services (DDNS) at the LEKMA Hospital in Teshie, was one of the initial people to be recruited when the project started. Working with the RCH Unit at Ashaiman then, she went through a Trainer of Trainers (TOT) programme in 2007.
Her role is to train field educators who go to the field to counsel women in Family Planning, contraceptive use and other Reproductive Health rights issues.
Most of the women want to space their birth but they do not know where to go to. “Our main focus therefore is to counsel women who are not aware of what to do to space their birth, then they are referred to the clinic where we render services,” said Mrs Awuah-Darkey.
The project, she said, had impacted on a lot of people and “we have many satisfied clients”.
She would therefore love to see the project rolled out nationwide because it will help a lot of women.
Story: Rosemary Ardayfio
Writer’s E-mail:[email protected]