Women and Children continue to suffer hugely in the Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis which dates back to 2017. The most significant impact of the conflict on women and children is displacement. Women and children make up 60 per cent of the entire Southwest population with many of them separated from family members and living at risk of abuse. Unfortunately, majority of these displaced women and their accompanying children struggle to meet up with their basic needs. Access to healthcare is equally difficult due to their increased inability to afford required services and supplies. To respond to increasing health needs by humanitarian organisations such as Doctors without Borders (DWB), they supported around 30 hospitals and health centres, and ran a 24/7 ambulance service alongside community health workers trained to treat simple cases of common diseases, such as malaria, malnutrition, respiratory tract infection and diarrhoea. Recently, DWB took a difficult decision to suspend their activities in the South West Region of Cameroon on the 29 March 2022 to focus on obtaining the safe release of its colleagues arrested by the Cameroon authority. This led to an indefinite cessation of their activities. This has left significant gaps in medical services in the region. Though other NGOs like Action Against Hunger, International Rescue Committee (IRC), Danish Refugee council (DRC) and others were providing similar services, DWB had specialized in child and maternal care. Displaced women and children continue to suffer the consequences daily because they can’t afford to pay for medical services. Pregnant women now depend on traditional methods of delivery and treatment for their neonate which are detrimental to their health and wellbeing of the new born babies. This has eventually led to an increase in neonatal death and high risk of contracting infections. This programme seeks to improve the health care status of displaced women and children born within the crisis in Kumba, Cameroon through improved access to quality Reproductive and Child HealthCare services.
Our Previous Work
Within the advent of Covid 19, Mi Niña distributed personal protective equipment (PPE) to some schools in Kumba to help curb its prevalence. Under the reproductive health program, a pilot project was implemented to reduce the prevalence of anaemia among pregnant women, lactating mothers and adolescents. The project focused primarily on behavioural change communication to effectively motivate target group comprising primarily of those at high risk to adopt healthy practices to reduce the risk of anaemia. This involved promotion of knowledge, encouraging the adoption of appropriate healthy practices and making provision of needed health products and services at the community level for anaemia reduction.
Sensitizations
Health awareness sessions are organized with different stakeholder groups on various health issues. These include sessions with women on various health issues such as women health, growing up issues, child care, reproductive health, nutrition, cleanliness etc. The sessions are tailored according to the needs of the specific target groups. Community events are organized to provide a platform to the community people to share their learnings, enhancing behaviour change communication, organizing cultural activities to spread messages of better health, and recognition of community.
