Employing ICT to reduce infant mortality

A non-governmental organisation (NGO), Savanna Signatures (Savisign), is carrying out a very laudable programme in the Northern Region.

The NGO uses multi-media technology, voice and SMS messages to educate pregnant women on a daily basis as to what they are expected to do in terms of their diet and general information to inform their health decisions.

The project is being implemented in four districts of the Northern region with support from STAR-Ghana, a multi-donor funding agency, and employs information and communication technology (ICT) to educate pregnant women on health throughout their gestation period to help reduce the high incidence of infant mortality in the region.

Health personnel and mid-wives have already been selected in six hospitals and trained on the concept.

The initiative is targetting 3,200 pregnant women in two years who will be selected by midwives, noting that those who are not educated will receive timely voice messages in their local dialects.

Dr. Isabella Sagoe-Moses, Child Health Coordinator at the Ghana Health Services, said on Monday that slow progress has been made as regards new-born health.

Statistics, she indicated, show as at 2011 for every 1,000 births 320 of the new-borns died, and consequently she expressed the need for Ghana to implement the Global Action Plan to improve child health.

The Global Action Plan is a World Health Organisation (WHO) strategy that focuses attention on new-born health, identifying actions for survival, health and development.

Enumerating the causes of new-born deaths, Dr. Sagoe-Moses said about 60 percent were due to infections and noted that 50 percent of new-born deaths occur within 24 hours of delivery while 75 percent occur in the first week of delivery.

In view of the above, this Paper lauds the innovative effort being employed by the NGO in Tamale, which is employing the information superhighway to spread the word and ensure that health delivery is accessible in the remotest of locales in the Ghanaian society.

This is crucial since observations attribute home deliveries as a major cause of new-born deaths. Exclusive breast-feeding, a programme launched in 1993, has not been adhered to as religiously as expected -- and as a result the Ghana Health Service is re-launching the programme next month.

Thus it is important to remove the socio-cultural barriers that sometimes limit access to services since there are major gaps in access to and utilisation of best practices, not excluding quality of service provision.

Deepening the democratic process

If our experiment with democracy is to bear lasting fruit, then it is necessary that all hands should be on deck to accelerate the decentralisation process in the country.

Deepening decentralisation is urgent to ensure smooth local administration, paving the way for more democracy, and greater participation in the decision-making process at the grassroots. In this vein, it is pertinent to state that until the structures at the local level are made active and functional, the dream of full decentralisation will elude us -- with serious impact on transparency and good governance.

A recent survey conducted in the country suggests that 68 percent of the citizenry claimed that they had had no contacts with any local government official to demand accountability.

This is quite serious in view of the fact that in the 1960s the population of the country hovered around just four million; but today, when the population has scaled upwards to 25 million, decision-making continues to flow from Accra.

It is quite arrogant that in this 21st century, people still sit in the national capital and make decisions for others. Decentralisation and local governance will not be successful if all of us do not play our roles. Concentrating every decision at the centre no longer holds!

In 2009, an effort was made to review the decentralisation policy so that the intended document would address issues of lack of application by many stakeholders. Devolution of political and administrative power from the centre to the local level constitutes the basis of the country’s decentralisation process.

The process has so far culminated in the district assembly and Unit Committees concept that needs to be deepened and strengthened. Our democratic path so far has seen six successful elections in the fourth Republic -- that is, since 1992 a burgeoning legislature, a vocal civil society movement, and a vibrant press.

These elements however only constitute an aspect of the democratic trail, and the effective decentralisation and devolution of both political and administrative power would put our nascent democracy on a firm footing that will stand the test of time.

This Paper believes that the next stage of the democratic process that ought to be speeded-up is the decentralisation process, to make good our belief in the democracy. This is a sine-qua-non!