13 years - looking back to plan ahead. MSF-OCG, Magaria Lessons Learned

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) - Operational Centre Geneva (OCG) has been present in Magaria since 2005. Each year, MSF is confronted with peaks of severe acute malnutrition and malaria which mainly affects children under five-years-old. Despite MSF presence during these months, mortality rates in the MSF-run ITFC and Paediatric Unit (PU) rise above MSF standards, while periodically, mortality rates in the community rise above emergency thresholds.

MSF has been supporting the Ministry of Health (MoH) hospital in Magaria since 2005, and serves a population of approximately 1.1 million. This does not include patients arriving from neighbouring Nigeria, whose numbers cannot be estimated, but have been reported in some years (2017 and 2018) at up to 34 percent of patients in the hospital.

With a macro-level view, MSF aims to look retrospectively at the project life cycle from 2005 to 2018, to better understand how the changes in strategy influenced project outcomes. The objective is to produce lessons learned from MSF’s 13-year presence, to support operations and inform decisionmaking for the longer-term strategy planned for 2020.