Access to skilled care is a critical need for Ugandan women. Each year 7,000 women die in Uganda due to complications of pregnancy. Access to care is impeded by the inability to afford transport to health facilities, and the poor quality of roads. Mama Rescue is an emergency dispatch platform helping mothers by using a voucher system. Our Babies & Mother Alive Program partners with local taxi and motorcycle drivers to ensure that laboring mothers reach health facilities in time.
In our districts of Rakai and Kyotera women often lack access to skilled attendants at delivery. Every year over 20,000 women require emergency transport to health facilities when they are in labor. In Uganda, delay to reach health centers and hospitals, where life saving care can be given, results in the deaths of 7000 women and 45,000 newborns every year. Brick by Brick's Babies and Mothers Alive (BAMA) Program is partnering with 48 health centers to improve maternal and newborn health care.
Mama Rescue Program is an emergency dispatch system using a mobile phone platform. A district-wide public-private partnership, we leverage networks of locally available taxi drivers to create a transportation/ referral system for mothers ensuring access to skilled attendance at delivery. This program is a partnership with MTN Foundation, providing: transport for mothers in labor from home to health center and emergency transport from health center to hospital in the event of complications.
With support of the MTN Foundation, the largest phone carrier in Africa, this program can be fully implemented in our districts of 500,000 people with a budget of only $100,000. When Mama Rescue is fully operational, it will provide life-saving transport for over 20,000 women annually. That's just $5 per laboring mother. Our BAMA Program has realized dramatic, 60% reductions in maternal deaths at our partnering health centers and hospitals. We are now ready to address this critical gap.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
