The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), through its Fathers for Good Health (F4GH) initiative has been making a whole lot of impact and improving the level of people's access to healthcare services in Bauchi state.
This initiative was developed by UNICEF and funded by the Canadian Government in order to encourage men to support and mobilise their women for clinic visits, routine immunization, antenatal care and better hygiene practices within their communities.
Speaking in an interview with newsmen on Saturday while commemorating Fathers’ Day, John Eki, the Social Behaviour Change Specialist, UNICEF Bauchi Field Office, explained that the initiative was specially introduced to ensure that children that have not received any form of vaccine before were reached and vaccinated in Bauchi state.
In doing this, he said UNICEF in collaboration with the state's Primary Healthcare Development Board did a rapid assessment where they went to two Local Government Areas, Misau and Ningi.
“We went to find out by ourselves the reason behind the parents not allowing their children to be vaccinated.
“It was quite interesting to see some of the underlying reasons why some parents were not vaccinating their children but increasingly, many of the respondents especially, mothers pointed out that the power to give consent to vaccinate a child rests with the fathers.
“They told us that if we want their children to be vaccinated, then we need to work with the men to be able to give them permission to vaccinate their children and that's exactly what we did and we recorded huge success in this regard,” he said.
According to him, the group had been able to reach a total number of 113 wards, mobilized 9,252 communities as well as 109,444 children to be immunized with different routine immunization antigens in seven LGAs of Bauchi state.
The UNICEF specialist further explained that F4GH has a total number of 1,130 members with more volunteers showing interest in joining the group.
“What this means is that in every LGA we work, there are ten men in each ward meeting the fathers and convincing them to bring their children to health facilities for vaccination.
“We are mainstreaming nutrition, education, and child protection activities into the work the F4GH are doing now.
“This will enable them to address not only the issue of non-compliance with vaccine uptake but all the related issues affecting children and mothers,” Eki said.
While commending the group during a field trip of journalists organized by UNICEF to Misau LGA, Turaki Goje, a father who had once rejected vaccination owing to the fact that he grew up without receiving any form of immunization, admitted that he was ignorant and negligent.
“Members of the Father for Good Health support team visited my house at different times but I chased them away each time until one day I decided to listen to them to receive their messages.
“After listening to them, I was convinced about the message and I immediately allowed all my children that are within the immunization ages to receive the vaccination. Today, I have healthy children and grandchildren in my family.
“In fact, I later invited them and took them to my village where they enlightened the people there and they all accepted it especially, the women. We are now accepting any form of vaccination they bring to us.
“Another reason why I rejected any vaccination before was because we used to think that there was some kind of hidden agenda behind it because we thought these vaccination exercises only took place in the Northern part of the country,” he said.
One of the members of the group, Nura Aliyu, said before the coming of the initiative, there was a lot of resistance to polio immunization, low attendance of antenatal sessions by pregnant women and home deliveries were on the high side which sometimes resulted in health complications.
“Thanks to the Fathers for Good health Initiative, people now recognize the importance of going to the hospital, particularly pregnant women, even our malnourished children have recovered.
”Before now, there was a lot of resistance to immunization, most households were against immunizing their newborns and many of the pregnant women were not educated on attending antenatal and giving birth in a health facility.”
Similarly, another member of the group, Ibrahim Maina, called on the state government to help provide the group with the necessary mobility especially, motorcycles in order to effectively reach some of the hard to reach areas for awareness campaigns in no distant time.
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