Lafiya Nigeria: Who Are We?
Dear friends and colleagues,
Thank you for stopping by this page. If you personally know either of me or Klau Chmielowska, you may have heard us impassionately speak about the work we do at Lafiya Nigeria, the global health non-profit we co-founded in June 2021. It is with great honour that we will start introducing you all to what has been happening in Nigeria since we launched our pilot project.
As co-workers on a project with the Oxford Development Consultancy in 2018, Klau and I worked for a Nigerian non-profit launched by the Ministry of Energy called Rural Women Energy Security (RUWES), which aimed to provide clean cookstoves to women of rural parts of northern Nigerian states, such as Kano, Katsina, and Kaduna.
Aside from sampling delectable suya from street vendors and exhilarating Nollywood movies, our visit made apparent that there was a huge unmet need facing rural women and children in northern Nigeria.
This is a need that is fundamental to maternal and child health, and even more so, to that of a woman’s agency to unlock her life.
Nearly 1 in 4 women in Nigeria do not have access to family planning options in the form of contraception, ultimately resulting in nearly 39000 deaths from live births each year.
It is with a mission to end maternal mortality in Nigeria by widening access to contraception that Lafiya Nigeria was started. With a community-centred model, and with health professionals trusted by local communities, we have built a scalable distribution model of the contraceptive, Sayana Press (DMPA-SC). To date, we have served more than 800 women in Jigawa State, in northern Nigeria, and we are well on the way to reaching 2400 women in the next several months.
In the coming weeks and months, we wish to share with you more information about the scale of the problem we are solving, the innovative contraceptive we are distributing, the amazing health professionals we work with, as well as other progress updates that we think are exciting. We invite you to follow this page for more updates down the line!
Yours Sincerely,
Jefferson Chen and Klau Chmielowska