Of all Integrate Health’s organizational values, its unique value of women in leadership is the among the most commendable. Integrate Health is always putting in effort to find skilled women in Togo to join the team.
Abire Konzou was one of the female staff members that the organization had the opportunity to welcome to the team in 2019. Abire was hired as the Data Entry Operator and is part of the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Quality Improvement (MEQI) team. Abire might be one of the people behind the screen, but her dedication and work is reflected in the excellent data collected by the organization.
Since Abire joined Integrate Health on March 19, 2019, she has been reminding herself to dedicate as much focus as she can to her job, because she knows it will help Integrate Health save thousands of lives of vulnerable children who are not guaranteed perfect health. Abire relates to the extreme difficulties that Togolese women encounter during their lifetimes, such as lack of education, poverty, and the huge responsibility of keeping families together without basic means. For that reason, she can’t help but value the access to care offered by Integrate Health for these populations who are most in need. For her, “Integrate Health’s mission is a complete one, because besides saving the lives of the newborn, children, pregnant women, and post-partum women, the organization also provides employment opportunities to a large number of women in the rural areas of their coverage. This is something rare to see in the country. With this program, women are not forgotten.”
Abire also pointed out that thanks to the contraceptive methods offered by the organization, women can realize their dreams without the risk of being hindered by an unwanted pregnancy or unspaced births. These reasons are why Abire is engaged to do her best to contribute to this meaningful job, starting with what she does daily in her position.
Abire enters data daily. She makes sure data are classified and can be easily tracked and verified. Abire believes that she contributes her time and energy for the ultimate goal of bringing a smile to a child in a faraway community. She works meticulously entering data while being cognitive that the decision-making process based on the data, she enters can have both positive and negative repercussions on target populations. Abire feels that this dedication is essential to Integrate Health, and it is a source of her professional learning and development. Moreover, Abire deeply admired the recent initiative Integrate Health took for launching a new assessment tool with ThinkMD to improve data processes. She says, “With this new assessment tool, I save time since most of the data is already entered directly by the CHWs and the mentors. I then devote more of my time to monitoring and entering data from the other sites where digitization is not yet activated.”
Abire, like the majority of Togolese professional women, found her way to empowerment through her job. It provides an opportunity for her to be a role model for Togolese young girls, especially those who want to do similar work. When asked what her message to the Togolese youth is, she says, “It is not easy to be a woman or to find a job as a woman. And this job is not easy; however, it is as useful as any other position that anyone would occupy in a company. There is no such thing as a silly job. The most important thing is to love what you do and to know that what you do as a job is useful for a purpose.” She continues to say that she is always inspired and motivated by the testimonies of satisfaction that the mothers from the communities served by IH share constantly. Abire is an important part of the MEQI team and she strives to contribute to the work IH is doing because her life purpose is well aligned with IH’s mission, which is to provide Universal Health Care to underprivileged populations.
As Integrate Health focuses on scaling to a Universal Health Care nationwide with the Togolese Ministry of Health, the organization aims to build a strong team with women like Abire as its foundation. Thanks to her amazing work, this team will help to bring great accomplishments to Integrate Health and to the Integrated Primary Care Program in Togo.