Give Women Recovering from Fistula a Bright Future

Greetings from Kupona Foundation!

We hope everyone is having a great start to the New Year! Thank you all for your generous support to Kupona Foundation and CCBRT over the past year. We had a great year while we continued our work to support vulnerable Tanzanians.

Here’s what we accomplished at CCBRT over the past three:

• CCBRT’s Maternal and Newborn Wing has performed 1255 deliveries since it opened in January 2022 and have moved from an average of 2 deliveries a day to 3 a day.
• Despite not having been as aggressive as we would like in patient recruitment due to limited resources, 10% of the women who delivered at the Maternal and Newborn Wing in 2023 were teenagers aged 13-19 years old, and of those, almost 40% received a cesarean section.
• The Family Planning, reproductive clinic provided 431 clients with family planning services including Implanon, UIDs, condoms and other services.
• In 2023, CCBRT conducted 462 fistula/perineal trauma surgeries and an additional 19 fistula patients were operated on in Lindi during two fistula surgical camps. Further, 23 former fistula patients graduated from Mabinti.

We have also begun implementing some new initiatives as well as improving others. These include:

• Increasing our outreach to ensure all women suffering from fistula are treated using standard guidelines. To do this, we conducted a baseline survey for planned capacity building for clinical teams in Tanzania’s Lake Region with capacity building activities scheduled to start in Q1 of 2024. We also participated in the IDEOF commemoration in Kigoma region involving all Fistula stakeholders including UNFPA, AMREF, Bugando and the Ministry of Health. We raised awareness about Fistula and fistula treatment through 11 road shows in four regions, participated in a NGO Forum in Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma, and engaged with the Ministry of Health for the Dissemination of Fistula Treatment Guidelines.
• We have increased our efforts to increase capacity of Community Health Workers on fistula identification. In 2023, the CCBRT team trained 300 Community Health Workers in five regions on fistula identification as well as conducted physical outreach to post fistula patients in those regions.
• CCBRT increased its capacity to provide specialized services in for neonatal patients through the onboarding of our new pediatrician at the beginning of December. She is conducting neonatal ward rounds and is teaching the team on how to correctly conduct brain ultrasounds.
• To date, women and babies have been treated within the Maternal Wing, however in 2024, CCBRT will open the neonatal ward and add an additional 3-4 neonatal nurses to the team. Once in place, an exposure training at the Muhibbili National Hospital will be conducted.
• And, in January of this month, CCBRT will open two new clinics! We will begin providing services to those with high-risk pregnancies as well as those experiencing issues with infertility. The clinics will operate once a week and anyone in need of the services will be provided with specialized care adapted to fit their unique conditions.

As we ramp up for 2024, we will continue to increase our impact to reach even more women with CCBRT’s services. Additionally, we plan to strengthen our antenatal clinic, family planning and SRH education, as well as daily data tracking. Additionally, we will conduct in-house training on critical and emergency skills for new staff to ensure all of our patients receive the highest quality of care and design new tools and services for women with disabilities in order to better serve them.

Thank you again for your continued support of Kupona Foundation and the important work happening every day at CCBRT.