WHARC Annual Report 2008 - 2009

The Women's Health and Action Research centre (WHARC) is pleased tp present it's 2008-2009 Annual report.Now in it's 14th year of existence, it is evident that WHARC has created a niche for itself in research and publications into women's health, public health education, advocacy and service devilery on women's health. As shown in this report, the main focus of the Centre during the 2008 - 2009 year was to continue to implement the activities of it's 2006-2010 strategic
plan.

The strategic plan, itselfis devited to scaling up best prectices on reproductive health throughout sub-Saharan Afric and to increase awareness on current evidence-based practices for promoting women's health in the region.

The major highlights of this report include intense research and advocacy on reduction of maternal mortality in Nigeria, the implementation of a program on training of primary health care workers to better manage the third stage of labour, capacity building of private practitioners on provision of qualitative reproductive health care in nine states of Nigeria, and the launch  of a new program to investigate ways and means to increase political will for promoting maternal health at the sub-national level in Nigeria.

WHARC Annual Report 2005 - 2006

The Women's Health and Action Research Center (WHARC) obtained a two-year grant from the Ford Foundation to consolidate its programs on women's reproductive health in Nigeria during the period January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2005.

WHARC conducted an external evaluation of its programs and used the results of the external evaluation to develop a new Strategic Plan (2006-2010) for the center. We celebrated the 10-Anniversary of the Center during the period and also started the process of developing a permanent site for the center. Other specific activities in the center reported are as follows :

• Prgram to promote access to safe abortion practices in Nigeria
• New initiative to research abortion in Africa
• Emergency contraception project
• Misoprostol for the prevention of primary post-partum hemorrhage
• WHARC's HIV/AIDS programming
• WHARC's programming on safe motherhood
• The Ransome-Kuti Policy and Leadership Development program (RPLD)
• Health policy development project in Africa
• Report on service delivery
• African Journal of Reproductive Health
• Conferences and workshops attended by WHARC

Taken together with the previous annual reports, this report of activities on the grant concludes the reporting on the two year grant. This grant has assisted the center in innumerable ways to expand its frontiers and to build considerable capacity in its eforts to consolidate its hold on reproductive health servics delivery in Nigeria.

WHARC Newsletter - Vol1 - Number-1 2009

On behalf of the Board of Trustees, Associates and Staff of the Women's Health and Action Research Centre (WHARC), it is my pleasure to introduce this volume of the Women's Health Forum (WHF), the official newsletter of WHARC. WHF was established in 1998, three years after the founding of WHARC, and it has been published uninterruptedly since then.

This edition of the Forum has provided a broad over-view of the activities carried out in WHARC over the last six months.