Ismaila Ahmed-Mohammed
- Master of Public Health (MPH)
- Master of Health Economics
- Certificate in Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programs
- Master of Policy and Development Studies (Awaiting Dissertation)
- Award:State Honours Award as the overall best youth corp memberAwarding Organization:National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) KatsinaDate Awarded:November 1, 2009
- Award:MDGs Community Development Service AwardAwarding Organization:NYSC/MDGsDate Awarded:November 1, 2009
- In 2014 I provided technical leadership to Nigeria's LARC task shifting and task sharing research that saw to the Nigeria's FMOH endorsing and adopting the 'FP task shifting and task sharing policy' that allowed CHEWs to provide LARC services, thereby playing a major role in reaching the hard-to-reach and undeserved. I led the development of the Nigeria’s Plan for Accelerated Introduction and Scale-up of DMPA-SC (Sayana Press), and I am now supporting its domestication in 3 states, thereby playing a major role in expanding birth control options for women in the country. Since 2018 I have lead the implementation of the SHOPS Plus project in the FCT. Where we enhanced the training curriculum, trained 3 master, 35 state trainers, 8 mentors, 225 CHEWs, over 100 doctors and nurse/midwives
I came from a part of Nigeria where having many children was and is still the order of the day. I am the 2nd of 11 surviving children of my parent, growing up with many siblings was very difficult and challenging. When I went to medical school and was taught family planning by teachers that understood not just the medical side but also the social and economic angle, the opportunity of seeing the 2 sides of the divide changed my thoughts and ignited my passion and I became campus FP champion.
Service providers have believes, norms and values which lead to personal biases in their delivery of FP service, they do not realize that the biases were inimical to accessing FP services. In addition religious and cultural believes of communities have bearings on issues concerning gender bias and GBV. All these are very sensitive and difficult to address, so in the SHOPS Plus training I lead in handling this session and we always end it with resounding testimonies of positive change.
I will use the money and the additional experiences gained to support a local NGO in northern Nigeria working with youth and women to create more awareness and increase access to family planning services especially for adolescents and young girls. Additionally, I will leverage on this new platform to reach out to more young people working in the spheres of FP and support them to continue to promote gender balance, right to voluntary family planning service with free, full and informed choices.
