Every day, Marie stopes team members engage communities to create demand and work with supported healthcare facilities owned by the government to strengthen the quality of sexual and reproductive health services.
In doing this, we observed that some health facilities especially those in rural communities with difficult terrain need support to maintain good sanitation as they do not have enough personnel to keep the facility clean.
Recognising that MSION is not able to change the infrastructure of the health facilities, our teams in Northwest II covering Sokoto, Zamfara and Kebbi states began engaging stakeholders to facilitate communities to volunteer and help clean up the health facilities in their localities that do not have the personnel to clean the environment as often as required.
The process involves getting community leaders and stakeholders to be aware of the hygiene and sanitation conditions of the facilities and the implications and get them to commit to supporting the process.
The communities would always support individuals and groups donating different items such as brooms, mop sticks, cobweb removers, water, detergent etc including coming out to do the cleanup.
The Community Mobilization officers lead this process, identifying the health facility with such needs, conduct community engagement with the stakeholders and mobilize for a good turn up of volunteers for actual clean up. In all these, all materials used have been provided by the communities.
On Tuesday, August 24th the team in Sokoto provided sanitation services at Dispensary Yarabba, a PSS supported facility in Wamakko Local Government Area.
In the last two months, the Northwest II team have successfully carried this activity out across five health facilities with poor sanitation conditions. It is exciting to see men come out and support these efforts. It is also enabling the bigger conversation on Male involvement in family planning as these events are used to continue discussions on partner support for the uptake of child spacing methods.
