06 Mar 2024

Government continues to strive towards reducing maternal deaths in an effort to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of 70 deaths per 100 000 live births by 2030.

This was revealed by Minister of Health, Dr Edwin Dikoloti in Parliament during the presentation of the ministry’s budget proposal for the 2024/2025 financial year.

He noted that there was a decline in child mortality rates in the past two years, highlighting that 493 deaths of under fives were recorded in 2023 compared to 663 in 2022. 

“The causes of these deaths are pre-maturity, sepsis, malnutrition, diarrhoea and pneumonia,” he said.

Dr Dikoloti said the Ministry of Health would embark on a maternal mortality reduction project in collaboration with the Centre for Disease Control through PEPFAR support in the coming financial year.

He said the project was expected to limit births among women who had had more than six pregnancies. 

He said to achieve a reduction in maternal deaths, his ministry was embarking on capacity building covering a wide range of service providers in the districts in order to establish community-based teams of healthcare workers and support staff. 

“Our comprehensive approach towards reducing the deaths encompasses capacity-building for health workers focusing on essential programmes such as the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI), Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission, Emergency Obstetric and Neonatal Care, Expanded Programme on Immunisation and other high impact interventions,” he stated.

He said the engagement of Ntlo ya Dikgosi had been one of the significant advocacy efforts to reach communities with preventive messages on adoption  of contraception to avert unwanted and unplanned pregnancies among adolescent girls and young women.

In addition, he said a survey was conducted in health facilities in all the 27 districts and that the main objective was to assess the quality of outpatient  child health services and to close identified gaps accordingly.

The implementation of the strategies, the minister said were pivotal towards the SDGs for child survival, which aim to reduce under five mortality rates to 25 or fewer per 1 000 live births by 2030.

He said of critical concern was the disproportionate neonatal deaths constituting over 60 per cent of under five deaths.

To address the challenge, Dr Dikoloti said a neonatal case management and resuscitation training was done in all hospitals while pre-service IMCI training was done annually at institutes of health sciences and the University of Botswana for final  year nursing students.

He emphasised the ministry’s commitment to equip health workers with the necessary skills to manage childhood illnesses with particular focus on the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses and the Expanded Programme of Immunisation.

With regard to school health, Dr Dikoloti said the Ministry of Health in collaboration with the ministries of education and skills development and local government and rural development had developed the school health policy.

He said the main objective of the health policy was to ease coordination of school health activities across all levels including national, district and local in order to reduce fragmentation of service delivery.

He also expressed government’s interest in joining a global partnership known as FP 2030 with the aim to improve access to family planning services.

He added that his ministry had developed and completed FP commitments and trained healthcare workers on insertion and removal of long acting contraceptives and heightening demand for emergency contraception. Ends