Private Sector Health Alliance leads charge towards free health care for 3m women, children

In a move aimed at providing access to free primary health care services and life-saving commodities, the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria (PHN) led by Aliko Dangote, Jim Ovia, Muhammad Ali Pate and other private sector leaders has led its strategic partners towards an innovative mobile health intervention to mobilise about 3,000,000 women and children to health facilities.

Partners involved in the intervention include SOML, VAS2NETS, GSMA, UNICEF, Access Bank, Stanbic IBTC, telecommunication companies, states, among others.

The mobilisation, which is targeted at women and children in high-burden states, will be done through the use of geo-location based targeted mobile health messaging – SMS and voice in local languages.

The intervention, which is in its first phase, was implemented as part of the Maternal Newborn and Child Health Weeks (MNCHW) campaign, a biannual national mass campaign that seeks to mobilise women and children across the country to health facilities to access free primary health care services and life-saving commodities.

Aliko Dangote, founding patron of the Private Sector Health Alliance, said: “This is the largest mobile health demand creation intervention of its kind in the country and we are pleased that PHN is playing a catalytic role in convening private and public sector partners to serve millions of underserved women and children in Nigeria.”

According to Muntaqa Umar-sadiq, managing director and chief executive officer of PHN, leveraging mass campaigns such as MNCHWs, to address demand side barriers through mobile technology, can help them leap frog constraints and contribute to the saving one million lives movement, in line with the Private Sector Emergency Plan to save one million lives and given the urgency to accelerate progress to meet health MDGs by the 2015 deadline.

He further said that they have deliberately coordinated the demand and supply side of their interventions such that they have increased social mobilisation to get women and children to nearby health facilities through geo-location based mobile text and voice messages (to targeted high-risk beneficiaries).

“We have also worked closely with partners like VAS2NETS, UNICEF, GSMA and GAIN to ensure a commensurate increase on the supply side with an integrated bundle of free health services and life-saving commodities such as vitamin A supplements, routine immunisations, deworming tablets, screening for malnutrition, long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets for malaria, ORS and Zinc for diarrhoea and others,” said Umar-sadiq.

According to him, when campaigns integrate the delivery of multiple interventions (e.g. vitamin A, deworming, measles, bed nets, nutrition and vaccination), they are able to achieve larger mortality reductions by targeting the right mix of interventions to the largest groups of children most at risk of death.

On his part, Muhammad Ali Pate, co-chair of the PHN, said: “We are also mobilising private sector capabilities to support the Saving One Million Lives (SOML) campaign. For example, financial institutions such as Access Bank, Stanbic IBTC and others have agreed to bring to bear their multi-faceted access points including text alerts, to create awareness through linked text alert messages targeting a relatively urban pool of high risk women and children.”

Kelechi Ohiri, the special assistant to the minister of health and technical lead of SOML, stated that on the government side, “the Saving One Million Lives Initiative has made remarkable progress focusing on performance management and delivery across the leading causes of mortality. To accelerate progress, the private sector through the Private Sector Health Alliance is a critical partner in enabling us meet our collective goals.”

PHN, which recently announced a $24.2 million commitment towards a Private Sector Emergency Plan to Save One Million Lives and a Health Impact Investment Fund to unlock the market potential of the health sector, seeks to build an unprecedented, world-class private sector-led coalition that focuses on advocacy, innovation, impact investments and public private partnerships to save one million lives.

It urged more private sector leaders to join the core group of private sector champions leading the movement to save one million lives of women and children in Nigeria.