Mother Care Group (MCG) an initiative which started in 2019, has been hailed as a vibrant initiative aimed at reducing infant mortality rate in the country.
A visit to different districts where this project is taking place, opinion leaders these include members of clergy, Traditional leaders, political party leaders and health workers have all agreed and opined that MCG project has done a lot in as far as protecting under five children from the jaws of early death is concerned.
Senior Group Village Headman Chiwinga from the area of Traditional Authority Chilowoka in Ntchisi says before the coming of this initiative in his area, his area experienced a lot of infant death but now since its coming of the project the situation has drastically improved.
"Let me commend Malawi Health Equity Network (MEHN) for this MCG project, this is a healthy strengthening immunization system where in my area we have managed to scale up immunization systems within the household this has come due to low immunization coverage in the past which led to high mortality rate," he said.
Village Headman Phale, of Traditional Authority Chilowoko in Ntchisi concurred with his counterpart saying the situation in his area is just good now courtesy of MCG projects.
He said women are able to meet together and share common ideas and improve their economic status. "The do meet regularly for their vaccine projects where they are able to encourage women to vaccine their children but after that they engage in Village Bank, this is really good, " he says.
Lovenes Selemani of Ching'amba Mother Care Group says women in the area are fully engaged in economic activities because their children are health.
She says immunized children rarely get sick. "So, because of that, we are now able to do economic activities while celebrating the reduced rate of infant mortality which is good," she said.
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MEHN Assistant Project officer, Hanna Dzongo has since commended all the MCGs in Blantyre, Liongwe, Chitipa, Ntchisi, Dowa, Kasungu, Mzimba North, Mzimba South and in all refugee camps for hard work towards the achievement.
She said the current challenge is traditional and religious beliefs from the local community. She said People still believe and harbor myths on vaccines.
Cold Chain Technician Mabvuto Guma says MCG have helped the district achieve World Health Organization (WHO) vaccine above 80 percent.
For the sake of background, according to Guma, the health workers provide several kinds of vaccinations. For instance, they provide a BCG, which is the kind of immunization which is given to the children just born at birth, the other one is the polio vaccine, which is also given to eradicate polio kind of disease.
From there, the health workers give PCV which is also another type of vaccine which is given to deal with the pneumonia and other ailments.
Other vaccines include Hepatitis B and the like. "In addition to that, we also give a malaria vaccine which has just been introduced in about 11 districts in Malawi and the GCC, a kind of vaccination which prevent children from suffering from malaria with a body a chest of about 40%,"
He said all this job becomes easy with the help of these MCG.
