Time To Address Effects Of Climate Crisis On Reproductive Health, Experts Say
The two day meeting convened in Nairobi, Kenya brought together delegates from 7 African countries including; Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzanian and Kenya to deliberate on best mechanisms to run, the program on population health, particularly on reproductive health and Climate Change.
Speaking during the workshop, EARHN- program manager, Patrick Mujiwa noted that a lot of work has been done in the area of productive health which has led to improvement of various indicators, however not yet at the goal post especially on Reproductive Health Environment and Climate Change.
"We will give special attention to relationship between environment climate change and Reproductive health. There has been little focus on issues of environment and climate change, and these are the issues which affect reproductive health services a lot, for instance if you have floods, the limit access to getting to a health facility where one can get information and other products,” he explained.
Clive Mutunga, a project manager at AFIDEP said that increased temperatures have a bearing in all sectors which manifest a number of ways directly through mortality and mobidity, and increased altered disease patterns as a result of climate change effects.
"An example is the notable vector bone diseases in places that did not previously have, we also see big impacts in health systems, impacted as a result of climate change and populations are not able to access health services including information thus cut across all health sectors," he reiterated.
According to Mutunga, maternal child health, family planning, reproductive health, nutrition, clean water and proper sanitation are among areas in health sector affected by climate change crisis.
Increased Climate Change effects affect African countries and hinder the region efforts to achieve the universal health coverage due to inability to fully meet health needs.
The EARHN network is also keen to look at issues of reproductive health specializing with Maternal and Child health.
“If you look at SDGs and Millennium development goals, we have not achieved those targets, although we have made progress,” explained Mohamed Abdikadir Sheikh, the Director General, National Council for Population and Development (NCPD), Kenya.
The Public health Experts maintained that unpredictable weather conditions highly impact on reproductive health, which is being witnessed in most African Countries.
The EARHN delegates also have mandates on behalf of their respective countries to work round the clock towards ensuring that all member countries have implementable policies to tackle climate change effects on teenagers as they are widely affected.
Kenya’s Ministry of Health already have plans in place to devise a policy that would help in addressing reproductive health and climate change especially in adolescents.
”We as a ministry of health are looking into putting out a policy which is going to address adolescent and young person’s Reproductive health and it will uniquely represent the issues; for instance, what are the determinants of health that are pushing the adolescent into early sexual debut,” explained Estella Waiguru from MOH.
Estella added that for Kenyan Public health sector to come up with a comprehensive implementable policy, the public health sector is digging deep into causes and effects to sort out on the challenges to effectively deal with early pregnancies and STIs in adolescents.
“This issue reproductive health being affected by climate change, in effect it keeps growing, if we don’t deal with climate change we expose our children to situations that are bigger than we have actually anticipated.”
The delegates noted finances and lack of enough health officers as major hindrances to implementation of some of the existing Reproductive health policies.
"We need to do more especially in putting in the money, am moving away from talking about policies because we have put in place very good policies, Kenya especially, we are known for very good policies,for example in reproductive health, but are we implementing it?,the reason we are not providing the Services is because we are not putting in the money," Rose Oronje, Director for public Policy and Governance, expressed a concern, and urged governments to pay special attention to budget allocation for purposes of putting the policies to work.
On the other hand, Jotham Musingizi, Director General NCPD Uganda advised that member countries have promised effective coordinated and sustained efforts to increase domestic financing for health as well as improved efficiency and utilisation of health allocations to realise Universal Health Coverage.
The 7 member countries coordination meeting is one of the regular meetings with the objective of settling on a common ground to tackle the public health challenges in the member countries.
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