Rural Health Mission Nigeria

Muhammad Saddiq Ahmad, RN, BSc is the founder and CEO of Rural Health Mission Nigeria and Senior Nursing Officer of Infection Control at the Federal Teaching Hospital Gombe, Nigeria.  For the past 10 years he has worked both in clinical care and in program development, designing innovative public health initiatives to support rural communities to access quality healthcare services. Under Muhammad’s leadership, Rural Health mission has identified and trained over 500 community health workers at local health facilities with basic lifesaving skills and engaged over 300 volunteers to conduct health outreaches to address short-term medical needs in extremely hard-to-reach communities.  It’s estimated that his initiative has saved more than 50000 lives.  Muhammad is an alumni of the Mandela Washington Fellowship, the flagship program of US President Barack Obama's Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI).  During his fellowship in 2018 he studied intensive civic leadership training at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Rural Health Mission Nigeria supports the unaddressed health disparities of pregnant women in rural Nigeria by providing access to quality healthcare services through training community health workers to build their capacity and skills to save life; supporting local clinics with essential consumables; and mobilizing volunteers for health outreaches to remote communities to address short-term medical needs and reduce out-of-pocket expenses for poor families. We also support public health through policy advocacy and community awareness campaigns. Rural Health Mission Nigeria proposes to implement its maternal and child health project: ‘the Lifesaving Intervention Project’ to reduce maternal, child and neonatal mortality in rural communities by ensuring healthy pregnancy, clean and safe delivery.

In Nigeria, 1 in 13 women die from birth related complications with estimated annual 40,000 maternal deaths accounting for about 14% of the global total.  One of the main factors contributing to the high incidence of neonatal and maternal death is tetanus and sepsis.  This is because majority of deliveries take place under unclean circumstances. With this project, we aim to train home health volunteers to counsel pregnant women on birth preparedness and complication readiness and distribute lifesaving kits to ensure clean and safe delivery.  This project can be a replicable model for other communities that face similar challenges; globally, each year an estimated 60 million women give birth with the help of an untrained birth attendant or a family member.  According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 33 percent of neonatal deaths are attributed to infections principally neonatal tetanus and sepsis. Each year some 440,000 infants die of neonatal tetanus and other severe bacterial infections. Infants with neonatal tetanus often have a concomitant cord infection caused by unclean cord care. 

Similarly, on average, there are 480 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in developing countries. Of these maternal deaths, 15 percent (90,000 women) result from puerperal infections, including tetanus. 

Lifesaving Intervention Project.

The Lifesaving Intervention Project is designed to locally assemble and distribute single-use disposable delivery kit in low resource health facilities to ensure clean and safe delivery. The birth kits are assembled by Rural Health Mission Nigeria volunteers and distributed to identified health facilities where pregnant women can access them when they come for delivery. In addition, we also train home health volunteers (birth attendants), whom we help to identify, on birth preparedness and complication readiness. After training them, they are tasked to identify pregnant women within their neighborhood, counsel them on birth preparedness and complication readiness and refer them to the nearest health facility for antenatal services where the birth kits are made available. We partner with primary healthcare centers in these communities as focal points and one of the health worker in the health facility is identified as the focal person who works closely with the home health volunteers to coordinate the referral of pregnant women for antenatal care and he is also responsible for the distribution of lifesaving kits to the pregnant women coming for delivery. The women either keep the kits with them at home or leave them at the facility until delivery.

We hope to implement this project in three rural communities in Gombe state including; Kagarawal, Lawanti and Akko. These are remote communities with concentrated population of internally displaced persons who were forced out of their villages in neighbouring states by insurgents putting pressure on the existing health facilities. The project will directly benefit pregnant women, neonates and under-five children, birth attendants and primary healthcare facilities. The health facilities will be supported to provide quality maternal services through supply of lifesaving kits.  In the past 3 years, we have been working with these health facilities on our "Facility support project" which supports antenatal services with regular supply of antenatal medications and training of community health workers on basic skills. It was from this experience that we identified the need to implement the "Lifesaving Intervention Project" in these communities to save even more lives. This project is important to the community because it equips health workers serving the community with skills to improve health outcomes and it will also empower them with the right tools to ensure cleaner and safer delivery thereby reducing maternal and neonatal mortality in these communities.

In 2014, I was inspired to set up Rural Health Mission Nigeria as a volunteer platform for young professionals and passionate health workers to support rural communities to access quality healthcare services by conducting health outreaches in hard-to-reach communities. Our main goal is to improve access to quality healthcare and strengthen the health system in underserved communities. I have lost very close friends and family relatives to preventable birth complications simply because they couldn’t access healthcare at good time. I was specifically terrified by the dead of my elder sister in 2010 who died barely 4 weeks after delivery due to anaemia complications while she was been transported to hospital but couldn’t made to the hospital and she was buried by the roadside. As a healthcare professional, I believe that simple postnatal care, such as access to haematinics and simple PCV checks could have prevented her death or provided early diagnosis. 

I have spent most part of my childhood life in a rural area where access to clean water, electricity and healthcare is usually a serious problem. At young age, I regularly accompanied my elder sister, whom I grew up with, to a clinic in a nearby village to seek medical help. She died in 2010, barely 4 weeks after she gave birth to her last child, due to anemia complications and she was buried at the spot where the incidence happened. Each time I visit the village even as an adult, I stop by her grave to pray for her since it was sighted very close to the road. My experiences growing up in rural community where women travel an average distance of 30 miles on foot to access antenatal services has constantly kept me awake and on focus to bring the needed help to the grass-root communities. These experiences feed my passion and motivations toward my work to ensure equal access to quality healthcare services.

I am a Registered Nurse with BSc in community health and prevention. Apart from leading Rural Health Mission Nigeria as a CEO, I also hold the position of Senior Nursing Officer as an Infection Control Nurse at the Federal Teaching Hospital Gombe, where my over 10 years’ experience in a multi-disciplinary health facility and community programming continuously sharpens my skills in public health practices.

In 2018, I was a recipient of the prestigious Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders through which I earned a certificate in Civic Leadership from Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA. 

Last year I designed and implemented this same project (The Lifesaving Intervention Project) in 3 rural communities (Kabri, Kara and Chana) in Sardauna LGA of Taraba state, Nigeria where we distributed 300 lifesaving kits in 6 months and trained 48 home health volunteers. With my experience in community development work and lessons learned from my recent project, I feel confident and optimistic that I am well qualified to successfully replicate this program throughout Nigeria and, ideally, globally.

Since 2017, Rural Health Mission has touched the lives of more than 50,000 beneficiaries including women and children.  Yet setting up the organization in 2014, did not happen without challenges. One of the most remarkable obstacles that I ever experienced as the CEO, occurred in the first 2 years. Two of our founding volunteers felt very strongly that our lack of funding to maintain the overhead cost of the office would make the effort unsustainable, and they stepped down from the organization. At that time, I was funding the expenses of the organization from my personal income and this was exhausting and frustrating. In Nigeria, NGOs and charity organizations hardly get funding support from the government or community donors and typically rely on foreign donors to get funds to implement their projects. My consistency, focus and continues to be on advocacy for health equity using social media and other platforms attracted passionate volunteers and some philanthropists to support my idea, which is very low cost.  For supplies, we do online fundraising. Our current volunteers are incredibly loyal, now, and remain because they have seen our impact over the years and they are inspired by our consistent messaging and mission. 

As I mentioned, in 2016, two out of my five board members/trustees resigned because they were reluctant to keep pushing and advocating for health equity without a clear source of funding support. I personally believe that the mission of the organization was not very clear to them at that time, hence they based their criteria for continued stay on the availability of funds to spend. Understanding this challenge, I dedicated my time to encouraging other board members/trustees to help draft the mission statement to redefine the purpose of the organization. We then collectively drafted our core values, allowing everyone to contribute to drafting the mission statement of the organization. This gave each board member/trustee and also volunteers a sense of belonging. Each stakeholder had a personal connection with our mission statement, which we can proudly say today is “eliminating barriers preventing access to quality healthcare in underserved and hard-to-reach communities”. We also added our vision; “To see every community in Nigeria with sustainable access to basic and quality primary healthcare”. I had one of the volunteers design the logo. From my experience, allowing everyone to have a say in deciding the operations of the organization significantly impacted their commitment.