Interfaith for Public Health Alliance Lagos State calls for collaboration, capacity building for members

Success Damian:

Interfaith for Public Health Alliance Lagos State (IPHAL), a registered advocacy body which promotes family planning/child birth spacing and other public health issues, has called for collaborations from organisations and capacity building for their members to ensure sustainability of their activities.

Dr. Ajoke Ashiru, Chairperson, APHAL, made the disclosure at the meeting of the group which took place at the Yaba Local Council Development Area headquarters, Lagos, on Tuesday, November 29, 2022.

Interfaith comprises religious leaders in Lagos State, both of the Islamic and Moslem faith, formed to bring their support to the Lagos State Government in providing enabling environment for uptake of public health services of which family planning is one of them.

There mode of operation include going to religious houses, both the Christian and the Islamic religious houses, meeting their leaders, talking to them and convincing them to know the importance of the roles they can play in ensuring that their members are able to take up healthy lifestyles.

Activities of the group, aside family planning/child birth spacing advocacy, was recently expanded to include public health issues. They support the government in ensuring the uptake of vaccines including the covid-19 vaccination, rotavirus vaccination. IPHAL also supports End Gender Based Violence issues, taking up of contraceptive for eligible members of their religious groups to ensure they are able to plan well for their families and eventually ensure good health for their members which makes them happy as religious elders.

Dr Ashiru, while narrating the experiences of the group, said “Initially what we were doing was squarely on family, or child birth spacing as the Moslems would call it, but along the line, after the exit of Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (NURHI 11), we now have to expand the scope to cover other preventive health issues within our community, and then also has to register with CAC for continuity sake and sustainability. We now have an office that was given to us by the chairman of Yaba local Council Development Area.

“Initially we were covering only 10 local governments but later on when we expanded, we have to cover the other local governments to make sure every community in Lagos State is covered,” Ashiru stated.

While speaking on their mode of operation, Ashiru disclosed that the group has done the mapping of the whole religious houses in Lagos State. She said “What we normally do is, every month, we have already done the mapping of all the religious houses within Lagos State, so what we normally do is we just pick two Moslem religious houses and two Christian religious houses per month and we have our members in each of the local governments, we must have at least one Christian and one Moslem to balance up because of the type of people we are going to meet.

Ashiru said “Our experience going through all these things has been very encouraging because some of them were not even aware of all these things, but majority of them are already aware, and they also give us their own personal experiences even with their own nucleus family. But sometimes we come across difficult religious leaders, but we have to use our maturity.”

Speaking on the cordial relationship between the group and the different religious bodies, she added “I said it before that the peaceful coexistence operating in Lagos has also assisted us in carrying out our advocacy visits, except issues like taking pictures, we don’t force them. We ask them, please we have finished with you, we want you to give us feedback and majority of them will give us very excellent feedback even from their own personal experience, and some of the problems they are encountering with youths within their organization. So with that some of them will say, you can go ahead and take the pictures. We also present the advocacy kits.”

Some of the major challenges faced by IPHAL in their advocacy duty include advocacy kits which they said are no longer available, issue of sponsorship which they reported was a major challenge. “We don’t have the youth among us and we need the youths, those who joined us before left because there is no incentive. Based on this we levy ourselves, we contribute money every month.”

Ashiru appealed to government and public spirited individuals and organisations to assist them in their humanitarian activities. “We welcome them especially on the issue of collaboration, there is need for advocacy kids, We need support in terms of funds, we are not saying they should give us huge amount of money, but something to sustain us, and we also need capacity  building for our members so that we can also step it down to the religious leaders.

According to a stakeholder who volunteered to speak on condition of anonymity, said part of the challenges face by the group include but not limited to funding because they are self-sponsored. “Though they have been trying to make efforts to write proposals to get some grants, but they have not been able to get the grants in this regard, so finance is always a big issue. They also get support from the Citizens Challenge Initiative and some other partners, they have been getting some technical competences too, but they still need some capacity building programmes, you know they are also religious leaders, even though they are professionals in their own right and there are still some professionals among them, but their core competences are not enough, so there is a need for consistent capacity building sessions for them to ensure that what they give out is accurate information, you know, when it comes to issue of health, you have to be very specific, so that at the end of the day it doesn’t become counter-productive.”

She also spoke on the need for a feedback mechanism in the course of the activities of the IPHAL “When we reach out to the religious leaders, what are the issues they were able to identify in the community, and when they identify these issues, did they get a feedback mechanism back to the system, and with the feedback to the system, is the system able to address these issues, because, they are the religious leaders, and they are right within the community and the system, they relate with the people, they know what the issues are.”