Hahi Health Care
• project title
Maternity and child health improvement
• location
Hahi settlement, Odwaine District, Togdheer
region, Somaliland
• sector
maternity / child Health
• direct benefi ciaries
12000 families (5-6 persons in each family), mostly mothers and children living in and around the project settlement
The project target site is Hahi settlement, Odwaine district, Todheer region. The population of the project target site is approximately 12,000 households mostly women and children.
95% of the households are returnees from refugee camps in the neighboring countries like Ethiopia. Hahi settlement community has no access to any type of health facility and services except the traditional birth assistants who have limited knowledge, skills and tools on basic delivery care needed for antenatal/postnatal care and general health, in addition children have no access to any health assistance unless they are taken to far distant towns. All the existed maternity and child health care infrastructures including health posts and MCHs were health facilities(two health posts) smashed down during the one decade longed civil wars (from 1982- 1991) and available health services were drastically collapsed in this period as well.
In regard to recent maternity and child health related needs assessment carried by Qoys Daryeel, it has been realized that lack of health facilities and services for mother and children is one of major constraints against the well-being of Hahi settlement community, while the major existing health problems are as shown below:
• lack of health infrastructure and services
• in adequate health skills of TBAs
• lack of any international and national assistance
• poor water source
• less knowledge on sanitation
Qoys Daryeel (Family Care) NGO has implemented a maternity health project co-funded by NOVIB/OXFAM and Qosys Daryeel (Family Care) NGO in Hahi settlement of Odwaine district of Togdheer region. The overall goal of the project was to enable the target community have access to quality of safe motherhood and child practices (obstetric, and antenatal/postnatal care) and general basic health services by the end of the project.
Project Implementation
Generally, the project was implemented as described in the project proposal; in regard to the final monitoring and evaluation report made by Family care, it has found that the most important strong and weak points are:
All the stakeholders provided their contribution to the project on time
Very strong health committee is formed during project implementation
overall sanitation of the settlement is improved and linkage and cohesiveness among the different parts of the target community such health staff, health committee, women groups and local authority has improved due to the capacity building workshops conducted by the project
Community received awareness on the relation between FGM and HIV/AIDS
A quality health infrastructure has been constructed
Community health services have been improved
Twenty TBAs (Eight above the project plan) have been thought on the importance of use clean maternity kits during delivery handling in the rural areas
The weak points so far Observed are:
Though we pushed the local authority to give a greater role to women for the community development. There is no gender balance in the composition of the settlement local authority.
The very poor households have limited accessibility to the improved health services due to the MCH running approach of cost recovery. In addition there is no type of social assistance to the most marginalized households from the government due to poor financial capacity resulted by recognition.
