Helping women claim right to safe motherhood

BY WATIPASO MZUNGU JNR

They dance, jiggle and wriggle their waists as if their bodies have no bone at all. All this joy is not for nothing. These women are only expressing their gratitude for the funding a local NGO has received for championing their right to quality healthcare, especially reproductive health issues.

Quality reproductive health services are as crucial in Malawi as they are anywhere in the world. Health experts have, however, reported of shocking revelations in the country’s health system.

Visits to six fistula repair sites suggest that obstetric fistula is a large and growing problem, exacerbated by poverty and famine, according to United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Statistics show that another problem facing mothers is the use of drugs and alcohol, including cigarette smoking, especially among teen mothers. No amount of any of these substances is safe for use in pregnancy. In fact, their use can complicate pregnancy even further increasing the likelihood of premature birth and other complications.

Experts have said before that premature birth and low birth weight create a wealth of their own problems, including brain damage, physical disabilities and more. The potentially lengthy hospital stay and increased risk of health problems for these babies leads to more stress on the teen mother.

However, the situation is slowly, but surely improving and women can afford a sigh of relief as government-backed Safe Motherhood Programme has established village committees on safe motherhood, organized transportation plans and provided training to traditional birth attendants so that they can recognize signs of obstructed labour and act efficiently to get a woman to a facility.

Government is trying its best by installing telephones and radios in some health centres to communicate with the referral hospital and request ambulance transport for women in distress.

Because of these efforts, reports UNFPA, over 90 per cent of pregnant women in Malawi are estimated to have had some type of prenatal care.

But Centre of Health Education and Health Appropriate Technologies (CESTAS Malawi), an Italian-Malawian non-governmental organization, believes government alone is not enough to deal with the problem. The organization thinks there is need for more NGOs to join government efforts in the promotion of safe motherhood, fighting drug and alcohol abuse.

CESTAS Malawi Country Coordinator Dr. Mario Bacchiocchi states that the fight can remain a lip service if NGOs concentrate their efforts in urban areas while leaving government alone to work in villages.

“While most of the local NGOs are operating in urban areas, their services are desperately needed in the rural areas where a larger population is illiterate. Women of the child-bearing ages need information on life-saving antenatal care. Women in the villages rarely seek professional help during pregnancy,” says Bacchiocchi.

Bacchiocchi explains that people in the rural settings lack the time to visit health centers. Access to professional healthcare is a nightmare for many people in the rural areas because of lack of health centres in such places. The situation sometimes forces determined women to spend almost all the day walking to the nearby health centre to seek professional antenatal care services.

And in its quest to support government efforts, CESTAS Malawi, with funding from UNICEF, has managed to introduce and maintain in-service training courses for midwives and health workers who work at Bwaila and Kamuzu Central Hospitals in Lilongwe and Dowa District Hospitals in Dowa.

These courses have helped health workers in improving the delivery of essential maternal and neonatal care to their clients based in urban as well as rural areas.

“CESTAS Malawi attaches greater importance to the training of health personnel for them to provide quality healthcare to the patients. We ensure there is on-going in-service training for all midwives and health operators at Bwaila, Dowa and KCH through different training curricula, which have been designed by the same target group in collaboration with the Reproductive Health Unit (RHU) and the Lilongwe and Dowa’s District Health Offices (DHOs),” he says.

And with support from UNICEF, CESTAS Malawi intends to extend its outreach and training activities to Community Rural Health Centers in selected Zones of Lilongwe and Dowa districts.

The organization will has also signed an agreement with the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa that will see KCH, Bwaila and Dowa hospitals receiving a donation of motorcycle ambulances.

CESTAS Malawi boss thinks the bottomline is that organizations should reduce unnecessary expenditures and channel extra resources to health issues. Bacchiocchi notes with sadness that other organizations have in the past failed to invest their resources in maternal health services.

“Imagine a world without useless wastes of money and with a concrete development for all the communities of developing countries. Imagine a world where expatriates earn the same salary of locals, where health services are free to everyone, where funds from donor community and international funding agencies are really destined to the final beneficiaries and they will produce finally some results. We are living in a completely different world,” concludes Bacchiochi.

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