Gender Equality Kenya Project #11579

Stand Up for African Mothers

by Amref Health Africa

Project Report | Jul 19, 2016
Midwives Trained Update & Meet a Midwife!

By Emily Correale | Manager, Development

Mary attending to a mother

We are proud to report that 8,193 midwives have been trained through the Stand Up for African Mothers campaign, thanks in part to you! This means over four million women will now have access to pre- and post-natal care and basic health needs. YOU are helping us to save lives across sub-Saharan Africa. Thank you!

Meet the Midwife - Hear from Mary, an Amref Health Africa-trained midwife in Tanzania:

Delivering a baby can be challenging. Delivering a baby in the dark is even more challenging. But helping mothers to give birth by the light of candles, kerosene lamps – or even mobile phones – is not unusual if you’re a midwife in Africa.

Once, I was helping a mother deliver her baby in the middle of the night when the power went off. She was already in labour, so I had to keep going using only the light from my mobile. The lights might go out, but we’ve still got mobile phones. I had to keep pressing buttons on my phone just to illuminate the room. To complicate things further, the colleague who was helping me had to rush off and help another woman in labour. The baby became very tired and I had to resuscitate him when he arrived. Thankfully, both he and mother came through.

I’m a midwife in Tanzania and delivering babies by the light of a mobile phone is just one of the challenges we have to contend with. Tanzania has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, registering 454 deaths for every 100,000 live births.

Poverty; limited access to health care services in rural areas; plus an insufficient number of qualified nurse-midwives and other skilled health care workers all contribute to these high death rates. There are just four midwives to every 10,000 women in my country, so many women end up giving birth without a health care worker beside them. They might just have the help of a so-called ‘traditional birth attendant’, especially if they live in rural areas. Of all deliveries in Tanzania, only 51% are assisted by a skilled nurse or midwife.

Being a midwife is all I’ve ever wanted to do. As a girl, I loved children and was fascinated by pregnancy. The first time I helped deliver a baby was frightening, though – all I knew of birth was what I’d heard from the labour wards and I got quite a shock. Luckily, the birth wasn’t complicated – which made it less traumatic for the mother, and for me too. That was 12 years ago. Since then, I’ve helped deliver hundreds of babies.

As a midwife, I want to give mothers and their babies a better chance. There’s so much for them to look forward to, but there’s much to worry about too. Like mothers anywhere, they’re anxious about caring for their baby without much money and how a new addition to the family might affect their lives.

That’s why my colleagues and I don’t just deliver babies. We work in the hospital and in the community to support the well-being of mothers as well as their newborns. We monitor babies to check their feeding and weight. As for the mother, we’ll make sure she’s healing well after the delivery and provide advice on family planning – it’s important mothers feel they can have these discussions with us.

All this means that life is pretty hectic. I wake up at about 5am and make breakfast for my family. I have a daughter of my own and also care for my brother’s daughter. We all live at my mothers house and she’s a big help. Both girls think I’m too busy at work, but they understand I’m doing a good job.

Usually, I’ll get to work about 7.30am, when I’ll look at the night nurses’ report. I’ll also get the instruments and medication ready for the day ahead, and have everything on standby for any deliveries. I’ll then start on my ward round, checking up on post-natal cases. I’m involved in deliveries from start to finish and the length of my working day varies depending on the number of cases we’ve got.

At the moment, I’m also fitting further study around my work. I want to do more for mothers and their children. But with limited resources, I couldn’t go back to school. So, I’m doing a distance learning course to develop my skills. I’m one of 89 students in Tanzania studying through an ‘e-learning’ programme that is supported by Africa’s health development organisation Amref Health Africa and the health care company GSK. The two organisations have worked together for a long time to help strengthen health care systems in countries like mine.

Education like this will help us swell the ranks of skilled midwives, allowing us to care for more women and children. The training I’m doing means I’ll be able to manage more cases on my own. It gives me more confidence in diagnosing problems and offering advice to colleagues – even the doctors. I’ve started giving talks to patients too. They ask me why I’m doing this and I tell them I want to share what I’ve learned.

Hopefully, the more skills I can get, the more women I can reach – and the more lives I can help save.

Links:

Amref Health Africa in the USA website

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Oct 7, 2015
Every Woman Every Child

By Emily Correale | Manager, Development

Tamale from Ethiopia

Amref Health Africa, in partnership with its donors and sponsors, will invest an additional US $2.4million in maternal and child health programs, specifically to train 8,000 additional midwives to update their skills in saving the lives of mothers and newborns in eight countries across Africa over the next three years. This additional training will enable Amref Health Africa to reach, per year, four million women of reproductive age and assist in the delivery and care of 800,000 newborns.

Every year in sub-Saharan Africa, almost 200,000 women die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. One in 39 women in sub-Saharan Africa is at risk of dying of pregnancy related complications, compared to one in 4,300 in developed countries.

“The unacceptably high incidence of maternal death in sub-Saharan Africa can largely be prevented through basic emergency medical care provided by trained and skilled midwives. Unfortunately Africa has a critical shortage of midwives, both in numbers and competencies. The majority of midwives in Africa has only received basic training and requires upgrading or further training to meet global standards for midwifery. Amref Health Africa, through our Stand Up for African Mothers campaign has prioritized training of midwives as one of the key strategies to reduce deaths of mothers and newborns in the countries with the highest maternal deaths in Africa,” Dr Githinji Gitahi, Nairobi-based Amref Health Africa global CEO.

Dr Gitahi attended the launch event of Every Woman Every Child in New York during the United Nations General Assembly week. Here the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “announced $25 billion in initial commitments spanning five years to help end preventable deaths of women, children and adolescents, and ensure their health and well-being.”

Launched by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during the UN Millennium Development Goals Summit in September 2010, “Every Woman Every Child is an unprecedented global movement that mobilizes and intensifies international and national action by governments, multilaterals, the private sector and civil society to address the major health challenges facing women and children around the world. The movement puts into action the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, which presents a roadmap on how to enhance financing, strengthen policy and improve service on the ground for the most vulnerable women and children.”

To mark its commitment to Every Woman Every Child, Amref Health Africa will train these additional 8,000 midwives across eight African countries, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Senegal, Malawi and Zambia. This initiative will contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under the Proposed Goal 3, which seeks to “increase substantially health financing and the recruitment, development and training and retention of the health workforce in developing countries.”

Midwives save lives. It is estimated that a midwife can assist at least 500 women during childbirth per year and deliver a minimum of 100 babies. They encourage pregnant women to undergo at least four antenatal visits, administer preventative medication (anti-malaria, deworming etc.), educate women about family planning, assist with the birth and follow-up and can respond or refer in complicated labor emergencies. Statistics reflect much lower maternal mortality rates when women are attended by skilled health workers.

So far in our earlier commitment to Every Woman Every Child, Amref Health Africa has trained over 7,000 midwives in 13 countries in Africa. This means we have reached close to 4 million women annually with lifesaving maternal health services and delivered up to 700,000 healthy babies per year.

Links:

Amref Health Africa in the USA website

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Jul 2, 2015
Trained midwives update!

By Emily Correale | Associate Manager, Development

Midwifery students in training in Maridi

We are proud to report on the most recent numbers under our Stand Up for African Mothers campaign! Currently, we have 3,719 students enrolled in our midwifery training programs across Africa, and 3,233 graduated, bringing the latest number to 6,952! That breaks down to 334 in Mozambique, 309 in South Sudan, 399 in Tanzania, 338 in Uganda, 3,401 in Ethiopia, 593 in Senegal and 1,578 in Kenya. Below, you will find an article recently published in the Gurtong, about how Amref Health Africa about 75 percent of the healthworkers in South Sudan, Maridi county, in an effort to reduce maternal mortality.

By Jok P Mayom

JUBA, 05 May 2015 [Gurtong] - In a statement released on May 5 2015 the International Day of the midwife the organisation said its priorities are on training and development of midwives in the African Continent.

“In South Sudan Amref Health Africa through Maridi Health Science Institute in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and other partners has trained about 75 percent of midlevel health professionals” reads the statement. The statement furthers reads that about 30 percent of them Midwives.

Amref Health Africa says South Sudan has the highest maternal mortality ratio in the world arguing that through training of midwives they conduct, safe deliveries can be reversed.

Amref Health Africa calls for greater focus on this important health worker cadre to reduce maternal deaths on the continent.

“Although global progress continues to be made towards the fifth Millennium Development Goal to reduce maternal mortality by 75% by 2015 progress in Africa remains slow and insufficient” the statement reads.

In light of this, Amref Health Africa through its Stand Up for African Mothers campaign has prioritized training of midwives as one of the key strategies to reduce deaths of mothers and their newborns in the countries with the highest maternal deaths in Africa.

The statement reveals that unfortunately Africa has a shortage of midwives, both in numbers and competencies.

The majority of midwives serving on the continent has only received basic training and require upgrading or further training in order to meet global standards for midwifery.

Meanwhile, according to the World Bank, although maternal mortality has declined worldwide, the share of maternal deaths is increasingly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa.

The latest joint World Bank statistics indicate in 2013, 62 per cent of maternal deaths worldwide (178,000 out of 262,000) occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, compared to 42 per cent in 1990.

Links:

Amref Health Africa site

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