There is so much more to do to embed the improved healthcare practices and importantly to take a step beyond this still very basic level of care for young children and mums. But for a short moment at least we should take heart and pride in what has been achieved for children – and hope that there is no turning back.
Our first health centre was at Baiima, it is one of 35 where we have trained staff and community volunteers and completely refurbished and re-equipped the health centre. The chief proudly told me that ‘our future leaders are being born here’.
I was last here in April 2010 when free healthcare for under 5′s was just about to be introduced. I’m here with one of our largest and longest standing donors to see the difference their work has made under the free healthcare regime.
When Sierra Leone launched the EVERY ONE campaign to save more children’s lives, it didn’t want to fall back on the tired, standard formula of simply pointing out a problem and looking to the government for solutions. What they really wanted, was CHANGE.
More than 5,000 midwives from 76 countries have signed a petition calling on leaders everywhere to show bold leadership and put midwives and other health workers at the heart of efforts to improve the health of mothers and their children.
As I get closer to Kroo Bay’s river, I’m genuinely shocked by what I see. The centre of the community is an open sewer, crawling with disease. Children still in their smart uniforms rush home from school and use the river as a toilet – there simply isn’t another option. I wonder if the kids I see know how bad they have it.
I slowly begin to grasp why children are dying in such huge numbers here from the simplest things – to survive in Kroo Bay I think you have to be pretty special.
Last week I took Harriet Harman MP out to visit Save the Children UK’s health programmes in Sierra Leone.We spent most our time in the slums of Freetown — taking in Susans Bay, Kroobay and Mabella. Our visit came just over a year after the removal of health user fees in the country for pregnant and lactating women and children under 5, and everywhere we went it was clear the huge difference this is already making.
Hopes are high and you can feel the buzz of excitement in the air in Pujehun, Sierra Leone. Save the Children has recently received a grant for our child protection team to work with pregnant teenagers and for our education team to improve children’s access to education. Meanwhile, the health team is continuing to implement their two-year project on improving access to primary health care, by empowering small communities with the tools and knowledge to treat common illnesses that children can often die from due to lack of medical care.
As Sierra Leone rolls out the first vaccination programme against pneumonia, our latest report finds that further investment is needed from donors to bridge funding gap for vaccines.
I asked a colleague in Freetown to translate ‘Send your children to school, this is for change’ and the result, in Krio, is the title of this blog. I spent eight days in Sierra Leone, which is currently going into its 10th year since the end of the devastating conflict that affected most of the population.
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