GOAL
- MAHSRA aspires to encourage equality in primary health care to women and children, as well as other vulnerable persons, that meets the needs both of the local community and is an integral part of the national health care system.
MAHSRA’s interventions within the health domain are majorly addressed within a problem statement, objectives, and major activities.
The Problem statement
The task of saving the lives of millions of women and female children throughout the world, who die every year from easily prevented illnesses, is daunting. The outrage provoked by so many needless deaths, however, can now be tempered by hope because demands for better health care and improved quality of life for all females are being voiced by communities, health personnel, researchers and policy makers.
In all societies, economic policies, such as those that enslave women in low-wage jobs under dangerous conditions, and development strategies, like those that take land out of subsistence farming and put it into cash crops, have a profound effect on the health status of women and their families. Mothers, many of whom are single heads of households, are burdened not only with economic problems but also with the consequences of civil conflicts and environmental degradation. They are often ignored by male-dominated health and social services delivery systems or denied equal access to services.
Even, within family disparities are regular predominant character traits of social and cultural bias. For example, preference for the son can lead to the daughter’s being given less food. The girl child is also expected to do more work and has less access to education and medical care than the boy. Consequently girls are often ill-prepared to marry and bear children, which they do before they are physically, psychologically and financially equipped to take on the responsibility. Often premature marriage begins a vicious cycle of malnutrition, where underweight mothers have underweight babies who are at risk of suffering from nutritional and educational deprivations. The problems facing women and girl children need, then, to be tackled at all levels: in the family, in the community, and in society at large, this is one of the reasons why MAHSRA’s intervention in the health domain is mostly focused on women and children.
Specific Objectives
- Educate and involve the local populations in programs about common health problems and what can be done to prevent and control them;
- Promote maternal and child health care, including family planning;
- Encourage the promotion of proper nutrition for rural women and children;
- Encourage immunization campaigns against major infectious diseases;
- Encourage projects supporting an adequate supply of safe water and basic sanitation lessons;
- Followed-up appropriate treatment for common diseases and injuries to women and children;
- Assist in the settlement of health bills for vulnerable and poor on-bed sick patients within health centres.
Major Activities
- Mobilizing communities for health talks on proper primary health care measures to adopt;
- Training of community based health care provider personnel especially women;
- Providing nutritional and medical support to vulnerable persons and less privileged families;
- Organizing and encouraging immunization campaigns;
- Supporting localities on their programs/projects to obtain portable and safe water;
- Organizing door to door follow-up campaigns for women and children under the support of our medical and nutritional assistance.
- Mobilizing resources to handles vulnerable patients’ situations.
