ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2019
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. In the three months the application was open in 2019, over 7,000 young leaders applied to join the Class of 2019 on 1,209 campuses across 135 nations. 69 campuses worldwide (just 6%) were selected to host the 805 Millennium Fellows.
During the Millennium Fellowship, Millennium Fellows' dedicated 96,705 hours and their 422 unique projects positively impacted the lives of 564,366 people worldwide.
UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT AFRAH JEMAL MOHAMMED, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW FOR THE CLASS OF 2019.
University of Jos | Jos, Nigeria | Advancing SDG 3 & UNAI 9
" I'm honoured to be amidst like minds to exchange ideas that would go a long way in alleviating suffering and creating holistic well-being, first on ourselves, then to our communities. It is said that you can't give what you don't have. I hope to be involved in sharing knowledge, experiences, passions and challenges with other young people like me to that effect locally and globally. In the next 3 - 5 years, the skills I gather would help me grow my impact. Life4Moms is at a very fragile phase of development and the most important thing now is knowledge capital. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: Life4Moms
WHO estimated that 1 woman dies every 4 minutes from pregnancy, pregnancy-related complications and childbirth worldwide. Nigeria contributes about 2% to the population of the world and about 14% to the global burden of maternal mortality. The current maternal mortality ratio in Nigeria is about 576 deaths/100,000 live births and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 target is to reduce this to 70 deaths/100,000 live births by the year 2030. In Jos, Nigeria, from interactions with the mothers themselves, we discovered that the causes are:
1. Low socioeconomic status of the women
2. Lack of basic knowledge by the pregnant women on birth preparedness and complication readiness.
3. Lack of skilled birth attendants in the primary health care centres.
4. Very long distances to the tertiary health care centres.
It is in this light that we founded Life4Moms which is an organization that seeks to reduce maternal mortality by tackling the 4 identified causes above.
We seek to address this issue by providing financial covers for the pregnant women through pregnancy, delivery and after delivery, while educating them on pregnancy, birth preparedness and complication readiness. Three packages would be made available to these women of which they would choose one, depending on their socioeconomic status and payments would be made based on their convenience (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly). This is called the "client-focused" approach to healthcare accessibility and this is where global healthcare is gravitating towards. Our competitors provide health packages but these are unaffordable by women of low socioeconomic status, hence the need for our scheme. We also train traditional birth attendants so that they can professionally handle emergencies. Health education tips would be delivered to these women via USSD, a mobile application and website, with reminders for antenatal visits and payments sent to them through their most convenient medium.
About the Millennium Fellow
Afrah Jemal Mohammed's a final-year Medical student of the University of Jos, Nigeria and the founder of Life4Moms. In 2016, she participated in educating about 300 school girls on menstrual hygiene. Leading Life4Moms, she won the CAMTech Uganda hackathon (2017), HackJos (2018) and the Next Economy pitch (2018) from which she got her first funding. She's currently a member of the African Women Entrepreneurship Cooperative. She strongly believes in affordable, equitable access to medical care as a fundamental right for pregnant women and those within 6 weeks of childbirth. She also believes technology is a strong medium for achieving this.
