The Future of Health Care in Mali Starts with Women

By Katherine Seaton, Editorial Officer ; Cheick Oumar Tour é, Country director, Mali and associate regional director, West Africa Gao Nursing School in Mali. Photo taken by Trevor Snapp for IntraHealth International.February 06, 2020More than half of Mali’s residents live in rural areas. Add to that the country’s shortage of health workers and high-quality training programs, plus political instability, and high-quality health care becomes much harder to access.But over the past two decades, IntraHealth International’s Mali country director Cheick Touré and his team have worked to change that. We sat down with him to discuss the changing landscape in Mali and what the future holds for better health care in the country.What accomplishments are you and your team most proud of in Mali?I’ve been working at IntraHealth for 20 years and I have seen this organization grow and make progress around the world. In Mali, we’ve seen more people getting access to modern contraception, more births at health facilities, and reductions in malnutrition.But there is a lot of insecurity and very few health workers in Mali, especially in the northern part of the country—about6 health workers per 10,000 people. So we developed a national training policy and strategy with the Ministry of Health to help rural regions develop their own health workers, starting with nurses and midwives, and helped open theGao nursing school in 2001.A lot of people wer...
Source: IntraHealth International - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Family Planning & Reproductive Health Maternal, Newborn, Child Health Digital Health Education Performance Leadership and Governance IntraHealth ' s 40th Anniversary Gender Equality Health Workforce Systems Nursing Midwifer Source Type: news