TO
KAYORO
Bringing Reproductive Health to a Village in Ghana
MARGARET CATLEY-CARLSON
POPULATION COUNCIL
|
FROM TO KAYORO Bringing Reproductive Health to a Village in Ghana
|
| How relevant, then,
is the Cairo Conference to a woman of Kayoro? The Cairo Conference called for the assurance of reproductive health, including all those aspects that could affect the ability of women and men to engage in healthy, enjoyable sexual relationships with or without the intention of procreation, and for a woman to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth in good health for both mother and child. Information about and voluntary access to safe and effective contraception must be imbedded in the larger concept of reproductive health.
Since 1994, Ghana’s Ministry of Health has played a key role in providing an answer to this question through a multi-year longitudinal study on the delivery of a series of primary health care inputs, including family planning services. The manager of these activities is the Navrongo Health Research Centre, a research station established within the Ghanaian Ministry of Health to conduct research, develop innovative programs, and demonstrate new policies to the government. Originally established as a site for research on the impact of vitamin A supplementation and malaria bednets on mortality, the Navrongo Centre has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, FINNIDA, and USAID to develop a broad-based experimental initiative on family planning and reproductive health. This reproductive health research program has been developed with technical assistance from the Population Council. Consistent with the Cairo thinking, Ghana’s integrated program offers free birth delivery, postpartum care, attention to reproductive tract infections, and family planning services. The government is seeking to improve these services in rural areas, where they are unavailable, unused, or underused, and seen as foreign and unfriendly.
|
