The Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health (PACFaH) has opened a multi-million naira training centre in Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital city.
Named after the late professor of Africa Politics at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, Abdulrauf Mustapha, the centre was commissioned on Friday in the Central Business District of the city.

Mr Mustapha was board chairmen of PACFaH, an umbrella organisation for seven organisations organised around the theme of family planning, nutrition, immunisation, pneumonia and diarrhea .
Declaring the building open, Paulin Basinga, the new country Director for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Nigeria, paid homage to the vision and partnership of PACFaH.
He urged the organisations to give expanded meaning and continued valued to the development of family health in Nigeria. He was assisted by Barad Tytel, the interim deputy director for policy and advocacy.

“The need for a dedicated space that we can call our own to serve civil society capacity development” led to the thinking of, and establishment of the Abdulrauf Mustapha training centre,” Judith Ann-Walker, the project director of PACFaH said at the ceremony.
“We hope with the centre, all credible civil society groups in the health space will find a platform where to improve the skill set of their members,” Mr. Walker said.
According to the statement on the website, PACFaH was set up in 2014 “to introduce innovative, social, accountability projects through the unique strategy of capacity building for CSO’s on the demand side and government champions on the supply side to build partnerships to advance child and family health through advocacy”.

When the programme ended in 2017,it was scaled up as PASA (PACFaH @ scale) to ” contribute to strengthening the Nigeria health System by creating an environment of responsiveness and accounting through the sustainable, goal directed and evidence based activities of indigenous and civil society organizations, holding government at the national and sub-national to accountable for its pledges and standards in child and family health”.