Over 20 women groups have converged at the presidential villa at the instance of the Federal Ministry of Health to deliberate on ways to strengthen and coordinate interventions around healthcare provision for women.

The Senior Special Assistant to President Bola Tinubu on Women’s Health, Dr Adanna Steinacker, whose office coordinated the meeting, said the stakeholders gathering is part of efforts to listen to the civil society, community groups, professionals, and leaders who represent and work closely with women at the grassroots.

She noted that doing so will help advance the vision of the RenewHER Presidential Women’s Health Transformation Initiative, which aims to prioritise issues affecting women across the country.

At the meeting on Tuesday in Abuja, Dr Steinacker disclosed that engagements will adopt the nationwide approach already put in place by the Ministry of Health and champion conversations that will examine policies, increase advocacy and improve service delivery for women.

In her words, “With the statewide approach, the goal is to coordinate and make sure that health is a priority in our national development.

“The goal today was just to listen. The conversation was about listening. Because really, the people that we need to get to, the people who the solution is created for, are mostly in underserved areas. And there’s usually a barrier to access.

“The advantage of bringing in all the women groups today is that they are the closest to the grassroots. And so if we really want to take the solution to them, we need to understand what the problem is. And this is not an office for one person.

“We have listened to the challenges. The purpose of listening is to understand really where it hurts the most. This is not a solution for one person or one office alone. The idea of the Statewide Approach is really to coordinate the interventions.

“And the next step is obviously then getting the right stakeholders from civil society, from government, from the ministry and the presidency level involved.

“And one of the options that was mentioned today was setting up a technical working group. And that’s not just for one problem, but as we identify what we want to tackle, we know that there are different groups that are needed to tackle those issues.”
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Some of the key Issues affecting wome’s health raised by the stakeholders include, women’s inability to uptake family planning services teenage pregnancies in mining communities, respiratory complications among mining women dealing with dust, Gender Based Violence, maternal mortality, poor mental health among women, emotional and economic abuse of women, poor child birthing services in farming communities, health education for girls, sexual abuse,, fibroid, malnutrition among women, pregnancy complications,, cancer, stigma against women with disability, VVF among girls as a result of child marriages, among others.