Project News

The first two cases of COVID-19 were confirmed on 11 March 2020 in Ghana. President Nana Akufo-Addo, began delivering a series of the nation addresses concerning COVID 19 in March, and it was announced on 16 March that all public gathering including conferences and workshops should be suspended. Therefore, the project stopped a health worker training in Northern Region in the second week of March, and the project members gradually started working from home. Furthermore, Ghana government decided to close boarders on 21st and started partial lock-down from 27th March. Japanese experts were ordered to go back to Japan temporally as its official national quarantine policy in March and April.

Current activities

The project continued activities even after Japanese experts went back to Japan. Japanese experts and the project national staff have weekly online meetings to update the progress of activities. Also, a series of technical team meetings have been held with the counterparts. Recently, the project is concentrating on the activities which can be remotely conducted with support of JICA HQ and JICA Ghana office, such as revision and finalization of training materials, procurement of equipment, data analysis of M&S results in 11 districts, Ashanti region and further analysis on the results of the baseline survey and situation analysis conducted in July 2019. It is a good opportunity to look at the achievement of the project activities and review the activity plan to achieve the target by the end of the project.

Affect to essential services

Meanwhile, it was reported that the COVID-19 pandemic may be affecting maternal and child health (MCH) routine services. Some pregnant women and mothers seem to be afraid of coming to health facilities for essential care such as antenatal care, child growth and development check-up and vaccination. It was a big shock for the project members which have been promoting the continuum of care through the project activities. Less coverage of essential services may cause increase of maternal mortality and newborn/child mortality. In fact, according to an article published recently, it is estimated that if the MCH service coverage reduces by 9·8 - 18·5% and wasting increase by 10% over 6 months due to the COVID 19 pandemic, it would result in 253 500 additional child deaths and 12 200 additional maternal deaths across the 118 countries.^[1]

Efforts in Ghana

Ghana Health Service (GHS), Ministry of Health, Obstetrics and Gynecology Society, and Pediatric Society of Ghana developed Guidelines for Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Service under COVID-19 Outbreak in April 2020, which aims to maintaining access to essential services to control direct morbidities and mortality from COVID-19 and avoids increased indirect negative effect on health and nutrition due to lack of access to the routine services. This guideline recommends that all routine services continue to be provided to clients with special arrangement such as effective patient flow, protection of health workers and clients and it also mentions that health workers should provide counseling and health education for pregnant women and mothers using MCH RB.

Provision of one million MCH RB by JICA

The Project decided to expand its support to the printing of the MCH Record Book to one million copies to cover one million babies born in Ghana this year. This support is intended to ensure access to quality maternal and child health and nutrition services for all mothers and children even under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Way forward

This is the final year of the project period. As other JICA projects in the world, we had to slow down the project activities due to the COVID19 pandemic. However, the implementation structure for trainings on MCH RB and the M&S has been already established through two years' project activities. Essential service training such as MCHRB training is recognized as a training which should be conducted even under COVID 19 pandemic in Ghana. The project is preparing to restart the trainings and the M&S with taking proper risk mitigation measures.

Online meeting

Face mask made by Ghanaian cloth