life and afterwards. In the 1970s, it was the rehabilitation of sections of the health care services of the Rivers state of Nigeria, destroyed through military operations in the country's civil war. As part of the post civil war rehabilitation effort, he helped to ensure that displaced students of Eastern Nigeria origin were reabsorbed back to their former places in university of Ibadan. In the same decade, he was a member of the medical research council of Nigeria. In the 1980s, he took part in various WHO technical working groups on anaemia, maternal mortality and VVF. In the 1990s, he influenced the formation of the National Foundation of VVF - a local NGO - becoming its president in 1997-1998. Its activities placed the surgical treatment of VVF in Nigeria's national agenda The WHO and other powerful international organisations and many NGOs have since taken over the concept and extended it to other African and some Asian countries. Kelsey Harrison published widely. Among them are 4 books and more than 100 medical journal articles. The two most widely known are the report on the Zaria Maternity Survey and his autobiography. His latest work titled Open these gates was published this year. Awards and recognition Kelsey Harrison became a College Scholar of University College Ibadan in 1952 - 1955. He earned the Doctor of Medicine degree of University of London in 1969 with a thesis on Blood Volume in Severe Anaemia in Pregnancy. In 1987, he received the triennial George Macdonald Medal awarded jointly by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It was "for outstanding research leading to improvement of health in tropical countries". In 1988, he was awarded the higher doctorate degree – Doctor of Science (Medicine) London - for his distinguished work and publications on the theme of "childbearing under adverse socioeconomic conditions with special reference to Black Africa". The Nigerian National Order of Merit came in 1989." He is a Fellow of the Academy of Science of Nigeria since 1988. For ten years, 1991 – 2001, he was a Foundation Member of the International Advisory Board of The Lancet medical journal. Among his prestigious public lectures are the William Meredith Fletcher Shaw Memorial Lecture for the year 1995 at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London and titled "Poverty, deprivation and maternal health"., and the 7th