Success Stories

A Life Changing Opportunity

This success story considers the broader impact of the Foundation Year Programme, an access scheme designed to help candidates overcome poor schooling and achieve the academic qualifications needed to win a place on and succeed on a professional course.

It examines other positive impacts that stem from giving young women from rural areas such a life-changing opportunity: greater confidence and social status, raised aspirations for women and girls in the participating communities, and changes to community attitudes to issues such as early marriage for daughters.

Hauwa’s success

18-year-old Hauwa lives with her extended family of 18 in Tumfafi in Northern Nigeria. Tumfafi, has just one health centre with only five staff to serve a population of 14,000. Hauwa left school at age 15 but due to missing credits was unable to enrol to be a health worker however the Women for Health team encouraged her to register for the Foundation Year Programme(FYP) at the health training institute. With her credits, she was eligible to take the Foundation Year Bridging Programme gaining the two additional credits required to join the mainstream midwifery course.

This success story recounts how many living quarters within Health Institutions were seemingly beyond repair. Women for Health supported the rehabilitation of these hostels into safe, clean and productive environments for students to stay and study.

Author: Abdullabhi Yusf Sada

Background

The transformation of hostels

W4H’s goal is to facilitate improved accreditation status for the Health Training Institutions (HTIs) so more female students are indexed as nursing and midwifery students, as well as CHEWS. At the beginning of the Women for Health (W4H) programme, surveys of the hostels at the Health Training Institutions found that they were in need of rehabilitation and in some case new construction.

Many of the HTIs had been refused accreditation by the Council and Board, due to the dilapidated condition of the male and female hostels. In fact many wondered how students lived in some of the hostels. The accreditation team refused to give any commitments until the hostels had been rehabilitated.