Transcription of interview with Dr. Daoh in English

My name is Dr. K.S. Daoh. I am the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone. I am the chief advisor to government among matters of health and I oversee some directors within health, especially all the technical directors in health and of course I also take responsibility for performance of health in the country.

(Interviewer) What do you see as the biggest challenges in your job?

The biggest challenge is actually insuring that we provide quality service that is also accessible to all in Sierra Leone especially the very vulnerable groups that we identify as the women and children, especially children under 5 years.

(Interviewer) And what are you trying to do now to reduce maternal mortality?

We are working very hard with partners and mobilizing stakeholders’ resources, even at community level, to create an environment where we know what the needs are and even within the ministry we are supported by programs that have received funding from many partners. We recently established a reproductive and childhood program which is new, with a new directorate and a team of very, very well trained professionals that work with in that directorate and that also has links with districts because we have a decentralized system. And the design of the project document and the strategies is such that as with adequate funding and resources there is every chance that we will reduce maternal and child deaths in Sierra Leone.

(Interviewer) One of the biggest problems here is the low salaries for health workers. What can you do to sort of help that situation?

This is where we are doing a lot of advocacy even with our government, the good thing is at the highest level of leadership in this country it is a problem that is very, very well known. We are also talking to our partners, that in fact because the economy is not strong enough to allow all of us in the civil service to have very good pay. We have even gone out to request that we have a commission, a health service commission that would look specifically at the issues around health and health workers. That way there is a good chance in the next two years to have a salary that is a living wage. For now it is still a problem.

(Interviewer) Would that be one of the things that you hope that your outside partners and donors would focus on?

This is our hope. It is not yet the vision of all of them because quite often we are reminded that it falls outside the mandate of most of our partners, but we are saying the partnerships should continue where are weaknesses are and this just happens to be one of the key points that we want our key partners to be sensitive to. And this is not new, we hear from heads of various agencies that this problem is one very critical problem in solving the issues of health and health care in countries. So we would expect that that is put in to practice and countries are assisted, especially our country, my country – to get our people on a living wage that will motivate them to provide services to other people.