Save the Children has recently built a maternity ward at Ntaruka Health Centre. This includes a waiting room for mothers in the last stages of their pregnancy, a fully-equipped delivery room, and a room for post-partum care and recovery.
I haven’t practiced midwifery for almost a year and a half, but this week I attended my old hospital, Chelsea and Westminster, for a midwifery simulation course. It really brought home to me how the skills we use in emergencies here are so similar to those we use overseas.
Earlier this week I attended a two-day seminar to look at the role of the academic and research community in meeting the Millennium Development Goals that relate to child and maternal health. It was suggested that the people who produce research and those who use it – such as Save the Children – are living on different planets.
Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. What’s that got to do with us I hear you ask?! Well, saving children isn’t easy. Where we can, through our programme work, we’ll save those lives one at a time. But we can and must save even more lives by changing the systems and societies that allow these deaths to happen. In the UK and all over the world, women and children do not receive the care they deserve.
It is interesting to see and hear CSOs on local TV and radio talk shows discussing maternal newborn and child health issues rather than the usual political debate of who becomes president or parliamentarian in Liberia.
The UK government has today launched a public consultation on its reproductive, maternal and newborn strategy for developing countries. Notice what is missing? Children.
Just got this note from my colleague David Morley, who heads Save the Children in Canada and played a leading role in the movement to get the G8 focused on saving mothers’ and children’s lives at their summit last weekend in Muskoka. Hats off to David. I wanted to share his reflections.
I met Suhaibu, who lives in Northern Nigeria, on a recent trip. He is a respected religious leader in Jibia (a town in Katsina state in Northern Nigeria) and also a Koranic school teacher who teaches children how to read and write in Arabic through the study of the Quran. He lost his wife and baby due to complications during childbirth. This is his story about what happened.
In Nigeria, more than 1 million children die each year before they reach the age of five. The country has one of the worst child mortality rates in the world and more than 24% of those children who die are newborn babies.
I have spent this week with colleagues in Tanzania looking at the plans for the EVERY ONE campaign. It has been a great learning experience for me to be involved in this kind of workshop — an eye-opener compared with the campaign discussions that we usually have in London or with other “head offices”.
