Niger
In Niger, MOMENTUM collaborates with the public and private sectors to bring essential health services, such as nutrition, family planning, and antenatal care, as well as COVID-19 vaccines, to people in regions across the country.
Partnerships with local and national organizations in Niger are critical to helping Nigerien women and children in fragile and conflict-affected environments access high-quality health care now and in the future. Three MOMENTUM projects—Integrated Health Resilience, Private Healthcare Delivery, and Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity–work in concert with Niger’s public and private sectors to increase the coverage and use of high-quality maternal, newborn, and child health, voluntary family planning, and reproductive health services. We also partner with the Government of Niger to respond to COVID-19 and manage and dispose of health care waste when vaccinating Nigeriens against COVID-19.
Addressing the Nutritional Needs of Mothers and Young Children
In Niger, more than two in every five children under age five are chronically malnourished (stunted) and nearly one in five is substantially below the appropriate weight for their height.1 MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience helps estimate the burden of undernutrition among infants under six months old to inform strategies and plans; provide technical guidance to the Government of Niger as it updates its national nutrition policies; and raise the visibility of the country’s nutrition activities within the region and elsewhere in Africa. The project also helps design and implement maternal, newborn, and child health programs following guiding principles and tools for the management of small and nutritionally at-risk infants under six months and their mothers (also known as MAMI).
We will also work with the Government of Niger to train health facility and community health workers to use the MAMI Care Pathway package of tools, which MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience recently updated. These tools will help practitioners more comprehensively address the nutritional and health needs of infants in fragile settings and mothers’ mental health needs.
Learn how nutritional assessments can be used as vital health signs for the health of mothers and children.
Promoting Family Planning to Adolescents
Niger has one of the highest fertility rates in the world, resulting in a large, youthful population.2 MOMENTUM recognizes the importance of ensuring that Niger’s young people are actively and meaningfully engaged in all matters that affect their lives—including as partners in protecting their own health and wellbeing. In the Dosso and Tahoua regions, MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience works with communities to design and implement strategies to improve youth engagement and leadership, as well as health-seeking behaviors, such as antenatal care and institutional deliveries. The project supports Youth Community Action Teams to implement youth-led research and analyze health-seeking behaviors, then create related activities sensitive to youth and their needs with consideration of these behaviors. This approach strengthens programming by giving youth a direct stake in and control over the process of informing young people’s behaviors. The documented results of the process will contribute to global knowledge of effective ways to encourage health-seeking behavior among youth in fragile and conflict-affected settings.
MOMENTUM also strengthens the health resilience of unmarried youth and parents under age 25 by increasing their participation in programming that integrates maternal, newborn, and child health content with a specific focus on couples. The project uses the “CoupleConnect” curriculum, which is adapted to fit the needs of first-time parents and looks at how “couple-connectedness” can contribute to household health resilience.
Helping Nigerien Women and Children Access High-Quality Health Care
In Niger, many communities live far away from health care facilities, making it hard for people to receive regular, high-quality health care.3 MOMENTUM Private Healthcare Delivery collaborates with various public and private health care providers to help Nigeriens access health services at the times and locations that best meet their needs. This includes mobile outreach, which brings antenatal, child health (including screening for malnutrition), and family planning services to remote communities. These mobile services also link clients to additional care, if needed, and train providers in the communities on common health danger signs and timely referral practices, especially for emergencies among pregnant women.
MOMENTUM also works with local partners to provide on-the-job training and mentoring for public and private primary health care providers in communities at fixed and mobile locations. Additionally, we collect client feedback to help providers understand the clients’ perceptions of the care they receive and continuously refine their approaches to better meet clients’ needs.
Safely Delivering COVID-19 Vaccines Across Niger
COVID-19 has slowed the economic growth Niger has been experiencing over the past decade.4 To help Niger recover from the effects of the pandemic, MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity assists the national technical working group on COVID-19 vaccination to develop strategies for managing, distributing, tracking, and monitoring COVID-19 vaccines across the country. As more vaccines become available across Niger, the government is ensuring vaccines are maintained at the proper temperature to maintain quality and safety from the point of origin through transportation and delivery to prioritized communities. MOMENTUM works with Niger’s government to strengthen the national immunization program by tracking vaccines as they are transported and delivered and monitoring their temperature. This work also includes sharing data from vehicle tracking systems and temperature monitoring to help the national immunization program and key stakeholders make timely, data-driven decisions to deliver the COVID-19 vaccine more efficiently to the Nigerien people.
Learn how we worked to vaccinate Nigeriens against COVID-19.
Improving Waste Management
As Niger’s population increases, its medical waste management practices must evolve and expand. MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity partners with the Nigerien government in managing waste generated by COVID-19 vaccination activities within the context of the overall health waste management system. We provide them with technical guidance on the design and implementation of national and subnational waste management plans and help identify solutions and new partners to manage waste, especially organizations in Niger’s private sector.
MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience: Niger Ministry of Public Health, Population, and Social Affairs; President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) Impact Malaria; USAID Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM); Niger Expanded Program on Immunization; United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Niger; Country Health Information Systems and Data Use (CHISU); United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
MOMENTUM Private Healthcare Delivery: Population Services International (PSI) Niger
MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity: UNICEF; World Health Organization (WHO); Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC); the World Bank; Asaan; Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Interested in partnering with us or learning more about our work in Niger? Contact us here or check out our regional reference brief.
Learn more about USAID’s programs in Niger.
References
- Institut National de la Statistique (INS) [Niger] and ICF International, 2013. Enquête Démographique et de Santé et à Indicateurs Multiples du Niger 2012 (Niger National Demographic Health and Multiple Indicator Survey, 2012). Calverton, Maryland: INS and ICF International.
- Institut National de la Statistique (INS) [Niger] and ICF International, 2013. Enquête Démographique et de Santé et à Indicateurs Multiples du Niger 2012 (Niger National Demographic Health and Multiple Indicator Survey, 2012).
- Blanford, Justine, Supriya Kumar, Wei Luo, and Alan M. MacEachren. 2012. “It’s a long, long walk: accessibility to hospitals, maternity and integrated health centers in Niger.” International Journal of Health Geographics 11, no. 24 (2012). https://ij-healthgeographics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-072X-11-24
- African Development Bank Group. “Niger Economic Outlook.” 2021. https://www.afdb.org/en/countries-west-africa-niger/niger-economic-outlook
Last updated September 2022.