Sexual Reproductive Health: Improving Child Survival Initiatives in Botswana

Ogar Rapinyana

doi:10.47191/ijcsrr/v5-i1-10

Abstract

Improving maternal and child survival it’s an important integral part of health care. A large number of deaths in Africa emanate from preventable diseases and largely in the first month of life. Majority of deaths were from preventable causes such as pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria and all accounting to 14.9%, 9.2% and 7.3% respectively. In an endeavour to the prevent and promote healthcare system, the government of Botswana came up with a special programme geared toward protecting the locals against common diseases. The government of Botswana, through the Ministry of Health (MoH), introduced the Accelerated Child Survival and Development (ACSD) strategic plan intervention with a specific focus on reducing the ‘under five mortality rate’ (U5MR). One of the high-impact interventions for reducing the U5MR is the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) strategy. The strategic goal of IMCI is to reduce death, illness, and disability and to promote improved growth and development among children under 5 years of age. Child welfare clinic and Nutrition has been discovered as one of the strategy to promote child’s growth and development. This strategy can be effective if it is implemented with IMCI and Immunisation.

Highlights

Improving maternal and child survival has become an important integral part of the health care system in recent years
Majority of the death were from pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria all accounting to 14.9%, 9.2% and 7.3% respectively In line with these deaths, UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) issued two reports on the global Action Plan for the prevention and control of Pneumonia and diarrhoea, all calling for the implementation of a package of interventions across the promote-prevent-and treat continuum, (Katahoire et al 2015)
The Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) strategy was formulated by the WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and was presented to the world in 1996

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Improving maternal and child survival has become an important integral part of the health care system in recent years. The reason for this is that maternal, perinatal and under-five morbidity and mortality are some of the formidable development challenges in Africa. By the year 2011approximately 34 million people were living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and 3.3 million of these were children under 15 years. Majority of these children live in Sub-Saharan Africa, (Argel et al 2018). The MDG 4 and 5 have been used as a standard to measure the human development level of any countries, region or continent, (Campbell & Graham 2006)

BACKGROUND

Findings

CONCLUSION