The Check! Check! Campaign, our inaugural special program, is an awareness drive encouraging women to check their blood pressure and urine during their antenatal clinics. The initiative has been targeting health centres across the country. We have so far prepared and distributed awareness flyers to over 100 health centres in Nairobi City County, with plans underway to expand to the neighbouring counties. We also give talks and training to pregnant women attending antenatal clinics during the visits to the health centres.
The Membership program aims to provide access to quality maternal health care through offering fuy discounted and fully sponsored antenatal, delivery and postnatal care services.
As the adoption of digital tools deepens across all levels of society, Zuri Nzilani Foundation is determined to leverage the power of technology to further its cause. As a result, we have the Mama Zuri Membership Program, which brings together and engages over 84,000 women on Facebook, the majority of whom are mothers who have experienced pregnancy complications. Our goal is to share a variety of videos, posters, and texts about maternal health on these platforms. We will soon launch Mama Zuri Mobile Application.
Concurrently with the above, the foundation is also tapping into traditional media channels like radio and TV. We are working with community radios and television stations. Up until now, we have had a talk show at Mukuru kwa Ruben radio and forged a partnership with them to conduct training for women from the surrounding area. In addition to radio outreach, we are also going to health talk shows on all TV stations spotlighting maternal health conversations.
It has become evident to us as a foundation that health care providers and patients often lack communication. This enduring challenge has led us to develop a special program designed to train healthcare professionals, particularly nurses and midwives, on effective communication, how to package the message, which channel to use and how to deliver the message. We will be rolling out in Nairobi County first, then move on to other counties across the country.
There is a need to infuse our current maternal healthcare with new thinking as well as methodologies touching on diagnosis, treatment, and care. The foundation hopes to address this challenge by accelerating the exchange of information between leading academic and medical practitioners across the world. Towards this end, the foundation organizes multi-sectoral, annual conferences on hypertensive disorders in pregnancy & other high-risk pregnancy complications. So far, we’ve held two successful editions; 2021 and 2022.