Unlikely activist: Toyin Saraki at TEDxEuston

[Music] [Applause] I gotcha Cory's invitation about a year ago and he said he was putting something together he was introduced to me by a friend and actually I'd never met him he was an online friend so I actually said yes to the invitation based on my close friendship with the person who introduced us and I was actually foolish enough to think I was doing him a favor you see because most of my life I've always been viewed as an appendage there's no matter what I've done or how hard I bought when I was born as a premature baby I was born to family of them extremely successful industrialist I was almost embarrassed when I was watching Monkees movie earlier on because I knew so many people that were on it and so I was viewed as my parents daughter after being viewed as my parents daughter I was educated very very well but probably the best schools in Nigeria and abroad so I was then viewed as a product of that particular teacher or that particular school and in fact I was the sort of product that was a good advertisement for this school I did everything I was supposed to do Ryland my verse is I could speak in public I could run I could jump I could swim I could play the piano up until grade five so people would say to me where did you go to school and I would tell them and they would be a rush on that school immediately because they wanted their daughters to be like me and the values that were held up as very good values at that time I used to revel in my superficiality I could pick up a magazine and I could order an outfit in my size from any country in the world with great skill and it would arrive within two or three days I was also intelligent I went to a school where because the books were imported you couldn't take them home because they couldn't afford to lose the books so I picked up a photographic memory very very quickly and it stood me in good stead later as a lawyer at close relationship with my father very very close contrary to popular Yoruba culture we could table any topic at our table and we could speak about it and so long as we could justify ourselves so my parents always told me that I was so small when I was born that I made up for my lack of size because I had three brothers I was the only girl I made up for my lack of size by developing a loud voice and being very very feisty and almost owning the space in which I was in despite being the smallest and the only girl and they used to ask me what do you want to be when you grow up and I used to answer confidently I want to be a queen and it used to make them and it used to make them laugh because um when uh perhaps it wasn't so funny because there's actually royal blood in my family but I would have two of them stabbed three boys in the back before it's got tonight danger and I used to spend Saturdays with my father we had a tradition and our family on Saturdays on Saturdays my brothers would go and play football and my mother would go to the hairdresser's and my father would go to his building sites now as the only girl I was supposed to go with my mother to the hairdresser but I learned that it was a very painful experience bending my head into the sink and so I used to make sure that I was in my father's car at the time he was leaving for the site and we would leave the site and he would talk to his construction workers and he used to give me a magazine to read it was called West Africa quite Darwin you know probably to most children of age five a boring magazine but I would sit in a corner of a construction site staying out of harm's way and I would be reading this meg not even understanding most of it but it was all bad development and he cannot make sand agriculture and whatever I was used to reading anyway because my brother's never wanted to play with me so books were my best friend and if life could be a textbook my own life followed its predestined path everything was very smooth and everything was wonderful and I loved my life my parents tried to foster a sense of charity and me but charity in those days in our sphere was you know if I didn't wear all my clothes my mom would say oh and after many clothes why did you give some to charity and I would pack them in a box and I would send them off to charity and I would feel very good about what I had done and I came to school in England again a Frank at school I graduated I read law and life was lovely never even occurred to me that there were real problems that could really truncate a person's life or slow a person down and I remember I was 27 and I was excitedly getting ready for my wedding and I was sorting out the dress and my mother and I were arguing how many beads you know what level of sequins and you know the guest list and you know I wanted maybe two thousand they insisted five thousand people so these were the problems of my life I have to say looking back on it I was very superficial but I reveled in that superficiality and I remember that um I got pregnant slightly earlier and I should have done but because I was small and I was slim my mother and I figured it wouldn't show and so the designer six weeks later first scan it became evident that well it would show because I was expecting twins but even so the designer renowned designer here in the UK I shall call his name because he probably embarrassed he assured me that he could put in panels and everything would be okay in the entire wedding preparations the only one voice of caution I ever heard was from ad our old consultant who I had gone excited they said no you know and you know flying to Nigeria I'm having my wedding and these are the plans and he said you'd better be careful because you know you were expecting multiples and I remember going home and telling my mother and like most Nigerian Mother's she said god forbid and I joined her you know we vilified the poor man I never went back I found myself a more meaningful doctor who told me of course you can fly you can do whatever you want to do you're going to be fine anyway I never in my life read the footnotes of any book because all I had to do was read the book and absorb it and sale to me life quite happily on December 6 1991 within 24 hours I gave birth three months prematurely I had twins I lost one and I got married all in the space of 24 hours my previously lovely life suddenly collided with the footnotes of life and I suddenly saw a side of life which was never as they say in my country supposed to be my portion in that Herring period I really did experience what was never intended for me and I was most unprepared but what I experienced was an unavoidable reality from majority of the women in my country the inadequacies of the Nigerian health system the lack of reliable information the absence of an effective referral system and sometimes comically the deplorable attitude of our hell workers on the third day after delivery which I think most women who've had children let's just call it engorgement day I was lying in the bed and still thinking or everything's gonna be all right you know my dad's gonna come in here in a minute and he's gonna tell me the ambulance plane is here and I'm gonna be whisked out in everything's gonna be lovely a midwife came into the room and she said your baby needs milk I was educated so I knew that you know breast milk was important for babies and even more so important for premature babies so I looked around expectantly waiting for the pump the best pump you know they have these lovely once they show on TV when you put in a battery and you hold it and you're listening to Mozart or whatever and she gave me a large white plastic bull so I looked at the ball and I looked at her and I said what is this one and she said start pressing so I gave her a sidelong glance which probably only Yerba people would understand where you look to one side and you look back at the person hoping that something would have changed and nothing changed she was joined by two more midwives who left on me and started to press I will spare you the gory details of the howling and crying that ensued a couple of days later it became my turn to learn about what the textbook meant by blood transfusion and what the reality in my country meant by blood transfusion the doctors arrived for their morning session and they said your baby needs blood and I said oh yes I know and be positive and they said yes but your husband is a positive and where is he at the time my husband happened to be visiting his father was in to go detention on some islands 90 of the coast of Lagos so the search began for another member of the family who might be a positive the issue of a blood bank did not arise we're talking about 1991 HIV had just become a reality even if they had offered me a blood bank I would not have said yes because I wasn't your typical Nigerian I didn't know that in your last three months of pregnancy you're supposed to be bringing members of your family to come and give blood and be storing that blood ready for your pregnancy anyway the call went out to members of the family and they all started trooping him to the hospital one by one to be tested I remember being very upset actually because my father refused to come to the hospital to be tested I didn't realize he was just scared like most men are in such situation anyway a kindly aunt was found whose blood group was oh and she agreed to give her blood at which point I quickly started racking my brains as to what relationship she might have had in her life because really this was going to be an arm to arm transfusion so I started praying to myself and thinking my goodness I hope she hasn't sort of had any irrational impulses because this is my newborn baby and I want my baby to survive and like many people in such a situation I turned to God I turned to prayer because I didn't have anything else to turn to at that point and I prayed and I prayed and I prayed and my promises to God escalated to fantastical proportions of what I would do if he would just spare the life of this child because we were talking about 1991 a one point two kilo baby in Nigeria we did have incubators but the power used to go on and off so prayer made a very large part and as well as praying because I was very very well educated and we had a global network already between my parents friends and my friends and people had met along the years I also reached out globally from my hospital bed so I heard from one person that there's a particular baby milk that has long-chain fatty acids and you know children can digest it very quickly I taught myself very quickly about global logistics because one person had to go to a hospital and you couldn't even buy this milk it was given out freely on the NHS so I even had to network this somebody who is in hospital already having a baby who can ask their Midwife can we have two cartons and then I found a courier company they picked it up they would bring it in so I picked up a lot of skills from my hospital bed but during this period the union of faith and tenacity and medicine and education and connections and then my conscience started to worry me and I started to think am I really that unique am I really the only person who this has happened to in my country or what do other people do who don't have a satellite phone at their bedside I'm talking about the very early days of GSM somebody mentioned then phones were like a suitcase they were like a suitcase in those days and I started to wonder what happened to other people in my situation and I had promised God that I would try to help so I started trying to help people initially I started with charity each time I met somebody I'm actually in my story but I liked it or not it made the newspapers I remember the day I brought my baby home from hospital there was a headline in a magazine what they call a soft cell a tabloid and some kind person had decided to deliver it to me at home in a plain brown envelope and it said the headline said billionaires daughters bad luck and I remember reading it but my baby was still in hospital so I tossed it aside and I focused on you know getting her the help that she needed him going to the hospital I remember one day meeting a woman who was just telling me about how her baby had stopped breathing once and what she'd had to do to get the baby to breathe again and I remember thinking you know because I was still you know it's a slow process self-development I thought well that happened to her it can't happen to me ten minutes later I was in front of my daughter's incubator and I thought she was looking very peaceful and then I thought oh my goodness for heart it's her heart moving so with one hand on the incubator I was calling with the other hand to the nurse saying please come and have a look and the nurse as per usual we're religious people in Nigeria so she was saying oh no the usual god forbid not your portion by the grace of God some 121 when medics start calling God do you become very very scared and the nurse approached the incubator and she screamed and she screamed and shouted this is sake go and call the doctor go and call the doctor so I flew out of the intensive care unit down the stairs carried a doctor the first one I met and I said go and save my baby and he flew up the stairs and you know put something on her chest and you know but starting in our heart and then shaved her head and put a drip in her scalp and then the little heart started beating again and I realized the power of communication and I realized that really to save lives you have to have everything you can't have just the hospital or just a doctor or just the health literate brother you need everything and so I started to work but even so I was doing it on a small scale I called five of my friends and once a year we would organize a run walk or stroll and we had sponsorship and you know we were a society women enjoying ourselves I'm doing good and I thought I was keeping my promise and then my husband became a governor of a state in Nigeria and I went to live in a rural area which I had you know before rural areas with weekends you know you went to your lovely country house on the weekend and you know all the stuff were there before you got there and they cleaned up the house and you had you everything was lovely and when you left they locked it up I suddenly had to live in a rural area and because I'm the way I am I didn't want to just live in government house and be waving at the people I actually wanted to get to know the people and mix with them I had once met my first development partner Jay Moriarity a villager who told me that if you want to help people you cannot just be bestowing health you have to go within the communities and the seed to the development of every community lies within that community so they normally will bring out their solutions and then you try and help them connect to what they need so this was the attitude took when we went to quality I was forever living into my current disguise quietly or getting people to take me in theirs and going to villages and finding out what the people needed and what their own solutions were and then trying to modernize it for them and I had a lot of program somewhere government programs some of my own I I felt finally that I was at the grassroots and I was happy until a friend I had made in croire her name was Chen Wei and coincidentally she was the wife of the commission of health she was pregnant she was educated her husband without commissioner progresses and she was going for her antenatal and all things were good and then she went to visit her mother in them and while she was at her mother-in-law's house she went into labor a month early she was taken to the nearest hospital and she presented at the hospital and they didn't have her health history they just had her and she was in labor so she was in pain they were trying to get her health history from her and she was burning with pain so there was a life-changing delay of about 45 minutes in that 45 minutes her baby began became stuck in a transverse lie which is lying across they tried to turn the baby and they couldn't turn the baby they didn't realize that this child had actually been in a transverse slide before and they had been trying to turn the child for we she was trying to tell them but she was screaming and they couldn't understand anyway by the time they realized that she needed a caesarean they couldn't get the theatre open because somebody else had had a cesarean three hours earlier and the auxiliary nurses had cleaned the theater and locked the door and closed for the day Chen Wei died with her baby in her stomach the cesarean that she was denied in her lifetime was performed upon her when she was dead the baby died too another thing they asked governor's wives to do in Nigeria is to visit the first baby of every new year so whether or not you want to be in the papers or not you're in the paper on New Year's Day someone like me who likes going on holiday sometimes you're in the paper in the 2nd of January because you've had to dash back to carry the first baby of the new year you get to the hospital and they find the most beautiful baby that has been born that day in choir actually it's quite amusing because I always got the sex wrong every time I saw a baby wrapped in pink I would say what a beautiful girl and they would say actually no it's a boy you know but I enjoyed going to the hospital to welcome new life and see the new baby of the year and one year I went to our state General Hospital it's called sin Tabor and as I was carrying the new baby of the year I saw another mother crying and I said why are you crying and she said her baby needed a blood transfusion and I said so why hasn't your baby being given the blood transfusion and they said the hospital with the blood bank is we can't get through to them we've sent somebody by motorcycle to that hospital so I dropped the first baby of the year and I carried the baby that needed the blood transfusion and I said let's go and I noticed the nurses were giving me that same very your vast sidelong look but I ignored it as I was carrying this child I suddenly felt awareness and that was when I realized that people pass water when they died this child died in my arms and the first sign of the death was the urination why we had blood banks we had the hospital's simple communication is what killed this child I've seen babies dying because their blood types were not compatible with that of their mother I've seen children die because the parents can't pay the registration fee to access the free care in the hospitals I've seen mothers die because a vascular surgeon is in the staff room next door but the obstetrician doing the operation wants to sew up the vein he cut accident by himself I've seen lives lost because even in the same facility they don't want to marry the health of the newborn to that of the mother so they can spot gestational diabetes when they see it they keep giving the child glucose until the child dies because they didn't know that the mother was a diabetic and yet because of my experience I've also seen the waste systems that are supposed to work properly do work properly I've seen the synergy of mother child system doctor research facility records at your fingertips and I just wanted to know how to bring this synergy to my own country I myself had three children after that very similar circumstances hemorrhage before delivery rushed into intensive care but the synergy works because first of all I knew what was happening to me and I was busy telling them and I was in a country where the referral system where because of course after my first experience I didn't think of having another child in Nigeria I have to be honest I'm always very frank and honest person but it was on my mind this promise I had made to good and I couldn't work out how to bring it to my country I couldn't even explain why people were dying in my country because like I said before midwives we have them doctors we have them nurses we have them help facilities no matter how basic we have them to the mothers I have seeking so why is it that our people are dying and then I realized that the answer was at my fingertips had to help them there was this book that they helped visit us in London pressed into my hands whether I liked it or not and warned me that I had to fill it it was the personal health record book and I realized that this was the crucible in which all the differences met with the mother and also would let a mother know what her country owed her in terms of health care so I picked it up and I went to and look for the people who originally wrote it I wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel I just wanted to make sure that I could bring this sort of a similar thing back to my country but then I realized I couldn't just copy and paste and take it back to my country when I opened it there was some advice on sunscreens you know so I had to for instance change the advice on sunscreens to bed nets I had to write an advice on tuberculosis I had to write an advice on malaria and in fact when it said where do you live I wrote in questions like do you live in a hut a single-story dwelling do you have an inside toilet or an outside toilet and because I had been working at the frontline for such a long time I began to know the sort of data that people wanted to have and couldn't get their hands on so I wrote all of this into the book it took me four years I was working with doctors in Nigeria with health facilities with the federal government and it wasn't plain sailing because a lot of the doctors couldn't understand why this lady lawyer who just happened to be married to a doctor all of a sudden was telling them what to do to pregnant women and wanted them even to write it down so sometimes I had to move by cells by charms by niceness and sometimes I admit I would pull rank I remember one particular meeting where I wanted them a health minister to meet with the primary health care development agency had to also meet with the national health insurance head and I phoned them and I lied to them that my husband wished to see them when they arrived I trotted my husband in and I said please greet them because there's something I need to ask them so he greeted them and he left and then I closed the door I closed the door and I said to them how much longer are you going to watch women dying because what you need to do to make the systems work it's not rocket science we just need to make sure that everybody is meeting at one melting point and God so kind they agreed the health record was born at the moment there's two or three hundred thousand copies and they're running out fast in Nigeria and the government has committed to actually putting this in the 22,000 primary health care centers in our country now I haven't finished winning the battle yet but I think that we now have a synergy where every single sector has decided to work together to make sure that our pregnant women and children are not dying when I try to convince people I use something that I learned about in the old days from Reading West Africa it's called the value of a statistical life we don't know how to measure it yet in my country because we don't have the freely available data yet to put together but basically it's what a government is prepared to invest in each person's life so I can't tell you the value of a statistical length of a Nigerian woman or a Nigerian child as in what the government is prepared to invest in us but I can tell you the cost of the loss of that life it costs one hundred and fifty thousand to give naira that is to give a purpose barrier to a Nigerian woman meanwhile it also costs only $10,000 to give her free antenatal care for the duration of her pregnancy it costs a hundred and fifty thousand to bury a Nigerian child because actually burial koster doesn't change according to your size it's only the cost of the coffin that changes according to how much wood there is inside it one hundred and fifty thousand to bury a Nigerian child but its cost in a public school all thirty-six thousand naira to educate that child so what I've been doing is I have been begging governments in my country and even in Africa to make this investment for women and children and even though I had a global outlook and even though I had a global education I'm an African woman and the solutions that I am preferring their African solutions and their impact is for Africa but actually but the research that I've done actually we're ahead of the UK now with our personal health record because we actually put the mother in the child in one book so there's no way that you can even miss anything that happened to the mother that could happen to the child I hope that my own little story of how I started because I'm probably the most unlikely activist on this earth but I hope my story will inspire other people to share their knowledge because when they say what is leadership I personally don't think that you're born to leadership or your groom to leadership or even that you can be trained to leadership I believe that leadership is how you deal with the challenges that you face in your life and the knowledge that you pick up from the way you deal with it and whether you squander it or whether you share it I just hope that my little experience today can make a few people want to share their knowledge and want to drive Africa forward because nobody's going to do it for us anymore we're going to do it for ourselves I thank you very much for listening I thank your chicory where I for inviting and Godspeed thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 163,937

Rating: 4.7308249 out of 5

Keywords: ted, tedxeuston, tedx talk, 'toyin saraki', childbirth, tedx talks, education, tedx, 'wellbeing foundation', ted talk, england, english, 'african health', activism, ted talks, ted x

Id: CATk4oaZdOQ

Length: 29min 37sec (1777 seconds)

Published: Tue May 01 2012