A recent Duke graduate has overseen improvements to Nigeria’s health care system by making immunizations more accessible.
Muhammad Pate, Fuqua ’06, who currently serves as the executive director of Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency, spoke on campus yesterday to a small audience of faculty and students about overcoming the complex challenges facing the country’s health system.
“Nigeria is a large country with a large pool of resources, but the huge distribution of resources causes some zones to be less endowed than others,” he said. “There is a huge mis-distribution in terms of access and utilization of basic health care.”
He noted that only 14 percent of the health care budget is dedicated to primary public care and 74 percent is appropriated for curing diseases—money he said could be better spent on preventing people from contracting diseases by improving their access to vaccines and willingness to be immunized. As head of the NPHCDA, he concentrated immunization efforts on polio, which has already been eradicated in developed countries.
His results have already been successful. Pate said there were 796 cases of polio in 2008 and only 21 cases in 2010. This year, there has been only one reported case as of March, according to data collected by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Pate used the disease statistics—which also showed a reduction in measles and meningitis among other diseases—to get increased funding for his immunization programs.
“We used the polio [immunization] deliberately to establish credibility in order for us to go beyond polio,” he said, adding that the organization will receive nearly $100 million from external sources throughout the next two years.
Community engagement is central to Pate’s efforts to increase the immunization rate. The director encouraged local governments in high-risk communities to work together to showcase films—called majigi—that educate people about immunizations’ effectiveness.
“There is a significantly higher [immunization] coverage of children where we show the majigi films,” he said. “We then took it further to reach the hardest-to-reach communities and used motor vehicles to reach villages where the only [government] service available was immunization.”
In October 2009 the NPHDA also devised the Midwife Service Scheme, hiring 4,000 midwives and deploying them to nearly 1,000 primary health care facilities around the country in order to provide them with a more trustworthy health care image in the minds of locals. The organization also sent 1,000 health care workers to rural areas as well as renovated and restocked 400 primary health facilities whose medical supplies had run low.
Ufuoma Akoroda, Medicine ’12, said she was impressed with Pate’s work.
“I’m definitely motivated toward trying to impact global health after [this presentation]. I’m from Nigeria, and it’s nice to know that work is being done,” she said. “Once I’m done with the experience and training here, I can go back [and help] as well.”
Geelea Seaford, assistant director for communication for the Duke Global Health Institute, said she hoped students would be inspired by Pate’s words.
“[Hopefully], when [students] leave, they’ll have motivation to develop—not just to sit and listen to an interesting lecture, but to engage and inspire people to do more and act,” she said.
When asked about his future plans, Pate replied, “I can not predict the future, but we’ve built our system on an agenda instead of management, so I am very confident that with continued commitment, [the NPHDA] will show even more tremendous results.”
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