The project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with the United Nations Initiative for Children Education Fund (UNICEF) and the Ghana Health Service (GHS), is aimed at reducing maternal newborn and infant deaths and to improve on facility-based quality care.

Mr Ahmed Kariama Awal, Director for Rise-Ghana, addressing an advocacy meeting at Nabango in the Kasena-Nankana West District in the Upper East Region, noted that the project sought to increase optimal breastfeeding practices, support countries to develop, implement and monitor in real-time cost data, encourage pregnant adolescent women and health workers to be friendlier to mothers and newly born babies.

Mr Awal said the project would provide the platform to encourage mothers to register their children immediately after birth so as to promote quality maternal health delivery in the area.

He mentioned that the Nabango community had benefited from the Rise-Ghana project through the education given to pregnant women to visit health centres regularly for antenatal services before delivery and said it had improved on maternal and newborn healthcare.

Naaba Ben Atugba, Chief of the area, said the CHPS Compound now has tricycle ambulance donated to the Nabango community health centre by the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) through the Ghana Health Service and indicated that health workers could now have access to the homes of pregnant women to provide health service.

Naaba Atugba, however, lamented on the poor road network in the area, and said the conditions of the roads made it difficult for health workers to access the area and provide quality healthcare services at the door steps of the people, especially pregnant women.

“We cannot get access to the various homes due to poor road network, most of the people in the community have no means of transport. Sometimes, mothers are compelled to deliver on the way and this has become challenging in the community”.

He challenged the community members to see the community as their own, and asked the people of Nabango to develop the community by themselves without waiting on any development agency to do so for them. This he said could be done if they dedicated time and resources to ensure development in the community.

 He called on the people to exhibit the sense of communal spirit by coming out in their numbers to assist work on the road to enable the community put its ambulance into use.

Mr Johnson Avalumboya Assembly member for the area urged the community members to come out in their numbers to help undertake self-development projects including maintenance of the community’s roads.

He further called on health authorities there to provide the community with a midwife to fill in the vacant space as the community CHPS compound and urged other development partners to provide the community with a residential accommodation for health workers since the only one they had  got burnt long time ago.