Success Damian:
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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.”
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