BY DEMOLA AKINYEMI

ILORIN—Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara State has called on stakeholders to partner with the state in its efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality rate.

The governor spoke in Ilorin, weekend, while declaring open a one-day training for health workers on maternal morbidity and child mortality reduction, tagged, Safe motherhood.

Represented by Commissioner for Health, Kayode Abdul Issa, Ahmed said: “We are making frantic efforts to ensure that maternal mortality is reduced to its barest minimum through the employment of skilled health birth attendants in all health facilities, provision of free mosquito nets and implementation of the biannual maternal and newborn child health week, as well as provision of free malaria treatment for pregnant women and children under 5 years in our health facilities.”

He expressed the need for skilled obstetric care for mothers and effective prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG), of reducing maternal and child mortality rate by two-thirds of the pre-MDG levels by the year 2015.

The governor said: “Safe motherhood, as a concept, refers to a situation in which no woman going through the physiological processes of pregnancy and childbirth suffers any injury or loses her life or that of the baby. It is on record that about 59% of Nigerian women deliver without attending any health clinic or any antenatal care.

The essence of promoting safe motherhood is that out of one hundred pregnant women, 75 of them will have normal deliveries, five will have to be operated upon, and 15 will have complications. It is sad to note also that it is difficult to ascertain those that will develop complications or will require operations until the delivery day.

”There is  the need for skilled obstetric care for mothers and effective prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal and child mortality rate by two-third of the pre MDG levels by the year 2015.  So far, the proportion of birth attended to by skilled personnel had dropped from 41.6% in 2000 to 36.3% in 2005 indicating a very gloomy likelihood of attaining the MDG.”