Dadamac & DFID: ESSPIN, consultation on reproductive, maternal & newborn health July 29, 2010

Hello Julia

It was a pleasure to meet you at Africa Gathering.

Since we met I have re- visited the DFID website and discovered the Nigeria blog mentioning ESSPIN.

I asked John Dada if he knew the blog author - Ian Attfield - as they are both involved in ESSPIN. John's reply was that "Our team works with the Nigerian coordinators of ESSPIN, so we are probably two steps removed from Ian Alfred. (snip) The ESSPIN work is in the public domain as long as individual privacy rights are respected. I think it will do us some good for Ian to know about us and our links with ESSPIN. One of the things we hope to achieve, post-ESSPIN, is to develop a network of the rural schools whose management committees we are working with, and help to raise the profile of their progress online."

However I see from Ian's latest blog post that he is about to leave Nigeria to take up a post in to Zimbabwe, for a new assignment working with the European Commission. I don't know if you would know who will be taking his place and if you could help John to link up with him/her.

You may be interested to read some of our blog entries about ESSPIN  - they point to mentions of the programme during our weekly Dadamac UK-Nigeria meetings. There are also four photos on Photos on Flickr of the school inspections that John and his team have done for ESSPIN. Yesterday during our UK-Nigeria team meeting we had an apology from two of the team saying "Sorry all - we had an unexpected visit from ESSPIN this morning" - but I don't yet have details of who the unexpected visitors were. (Nigeria being Nigeria, unexpected visitors need to be given the right kind of welcome, even if it means leaving other previously scheduled meetings.)

As you can see from the blogs, there is a lot happening, and we are trying to make more of it easily visible through www.dadamac.net. However it will take time, so  please be aware that the website only gives a flavour, rather than a complete picture, of what is going on. 

I also saw on July 27th that DFID had launched a consultation on reproductive, maternal and newborn health, so I alerted John and he emailed me on July 28th saying  "I have completed the survey and subscribed to updates of the discussions". I am glad he has got involved. There is such close connection with these issues at Fantsuam. I remember John having to leave one of our meetings to help a woman in labour. The birth was more complicated than could be supported at the little medical centre on the site, so John was taking her to hospital, and supporting her in every way he could. This included giving his own blood when they got to the hospital and she needed a blood transfusion. On a less personal  level, when  we helped Professor Dick Heller to explore the idea of setting up what subsequently became the Peoples Open Access Education Initiative: Peoples-uni - Building Public Health capacity using Internet, one of the two pilot courses that were developed and tested related to maternal mortality.

I am increasingly hopeful about better links between DFID and grassroots. We are trying to respond to all opportunities to improve those links. If ever you have ideas for how we might do this, or people we should contact, we would greatly appreciate your suggestions.

Pamela