Healthy Families, Brighter Futures Family Planning

This month the women in our community joined hands with the rest of the world to celebrate the International
Women’s Day 2013 with a theme symbolic of our post-conflict recovery and development efforts: “The Gender Agenda: Connecting Grassroots Women to Development”.

It was important for us to connect rural women to our post-conflict recovery and development efforts. It is crucial because all the vital statistics relating to women and girls show dire outcomes for our post-conflict recovery and development:

Our Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) still stands at a high of 143 deaths for every 100,000 successful deliveries;

Our Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is still unacceptably high at 25 deaths for every 1000 live births;

 
Our Mothers and Children are still exposed to such high malnutrition that 30% of our children are stunted, 16.7% retarded, and 5% are wasting away.  As a result of such inauspicious mother- and childhood figures, Gulu District is beset with the following:

• 23 women die every year due to pregnancy-related complications;
• 9 children die every day due to preventable health-related conditions;
• 3 out of every 10 children are stunted;
• 56 out of every 100 women do not use family planning;
• only 42 out of every 100 women attend the requisite four antenatal visits;
• 77 out of 100 men do not accompany their wives for health services; and
• 15 out of 100 deliveries are still conducted at home.

When you add to this the fact that up to 34 out of every 100 households in Gulu District do not have latrines, the management of the health centre felt that in order to reduce these numbers,we should not only carry out
health talks in the health centre but reach out in the villages too: health is made at home. It is only repaired in health centers and hospitals.

The management of the health centre feels that if we do not connect to the grassroots women first we cannot ensure much development.  It is only after we have given the rural woman and child a fighting chance at surviving high Maternal and Infant Mortality Rates that we can hope to successfully go about providing the wherewithal that
will connect them to development.

It was a marker of our intention to fight the obstacles preventing the rural, grassroots woman from participating fully in our post-conflict recovery and development efforts.

Karin Children Medical Centre believe in joining hands with the community in supporting the grassroot women it is like the famous quotation from the great British author Dorothy L. Sayers who said:

“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him – or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”

I therefore take this opportunity, to thank our donors who have seen us through these time. In so doing we will have finally and irrevocably connected grassroots women to development.