Rwanda Midwifery Association closes More Happy Birthdays project

By Elias HAKIZIMANA.

Rwanda Association of Midwives (RAM) in partnership with the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) closed a ten-month project dubbed ‘More Happy Birthdays’ by celebrating the achievements basically ensuring maternal and child health.

The virtual project close-out meeting took place on July 20, 2022 where stakeholders reviewed the achievements and challenges through featured presentations.

The project that was launched in August 2021 aimed at boosting maternal, new-born and child health in Rwanda and to improve the quality of maternal and new-born health care by strengthening midwives’ competencies with the use of the Helping Mothers Survive (HMS) and Helping Babies Survive (HBS).

During her opening remark, Josephine Murekezi, the President of the Rwanda Association of Midwives said that the project leaves good achievements that include knowledge and skills in the management of maternal and new born healthcare.

She highlighted some challenges that used to lead to maternal deaths.

“In the investigation we carried out, we could just find out that maternal and child deaths were not intended, but accelerated by lack of skills and knowledge.” Murekezi said.

From August 2021 until June 2022, the project achieved various activities including training multidisciplinary Maternal and Newborn Healthcare providers (MNH) according to Angelique Uwineza, a midwife and Project Manager of More-Happy birth days project in Rwanda.

“Among the key six (6) objectives of this project, the first one was to train 1,500 multidisciplinary Maternal and Newborn Healthcare providers, today we are celebrating that we exceeded this number as we trained 1,600 MNH.” Uwineza said.

The project reached 112 sites including 10 district hospitals, 95 Health Centers and 7 teaching Institutions.

The project has also improved education professional framework in reducing maternal and child mortality rate, gender equality and research evidence according to Mandy Forrester, one of the project partners at The International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) and Midwife Advisor Education.

“As we are closing the project today, More Happy birthdays are a success, we have midwives, nurses, doctors and we are happy that everyone is involved.” He said.  

Dr Oliva Bazirete, a registered midwife and Assistant lecturer at the University of Rwanda’s College of Medicine and Health Sciences who was also the-in-charge of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) of the More Happy Birth Day project elaborated on the achievements of the objective number three (3) and four (4) of the project of making two visits to twenty sites where qualitative and quantitative data collection, management and analysis were achieved.

Sustainability

Sustainability of the project was also taken into consideration by pre service training. Master trainers from teaching institutions have integrated the content into curricula,” Bazirete explained.

Hassan Sibomana, Ag. Division Manager. Maternal, Child and Community Health at Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) commended the efforts made through the implementation of More Happy birthdays Project.

“In Rwanda, maternal and child deaths reduced significantly over the last two decades, this is because of an improved Rwanda Health System that established programs under the government vision 2050 and the National Strategy for Transformation (NST1). The country has invested a lot in capacity building to make sure that safe maternal, child and women healthcare are provided and this is well mentioned in our 2018-2024 strategic plan. We believe that the efforts made by this project will be contributing towards reducing maternal and child mortality.” Sibomana said.

More achievements of the project

During the project implementation, a Safe Delivery Application was developed to help mothers.

The closed project built on the success of the 10,000 Happy Birthdays project, implemented in Zambia and Malawi from 2014-2016, and the 50,000 Happy Birthdays project implemented in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania from 2018-2020. These projects contributed to training more than 25,000 healthcare providers, improved quality of care and strengthened professional Midwives’ Associations.

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