Reproductive Health Sudan Project #4016

Healthcare to Save Mothers and Babies

by Kids for Kids

Project Report | Aug 31, 2020
Imagine Having No Healthcare... During a Pandemic

By Sage Lancaster | Fundraising and Outreach Coordinator

We must help families facing starvation

Cases of COVID-19 are increasing in Sudan, but families in most of the rural villages of Darfur have no access to healthcare. No nurses, no doctors in the villages - no paracetamol. With no advanced equipment and hospitals miles away, there is little the Midwives and First Aid Workers you have helped us to train can do if people contract COVID-19.

Lockdown has disrupted the supply chain and shortages of basic food items like bread are causing immense hardship. Inflation is up to 143% this month. People cannot afford food, let alone soap to wash hands to try to prevent the virus. Two and a half million people across Darfur face starvation. A food crisis has been declared in North Darfur, and children are in great need. People are hungry, poor, losing all hope.

And now there are floods - flash floods that wash away fields, crops, belongings, animals, and houses. In Darfur where people grow what they eat, one flood will destroy your harvest.

We urgently need support so we can provide help immediately, where no one else is. Goats will mean milk for children to drink, to stop starvation and combat malnutrition. Chickens mean eggs full of protein and nutrients for the weak. Soap will enable people to wash their hands and prevent COVID-19. Social distancing is impossible where families live together in crowded huts and must travel to busy markets to trade. Soap means hope - an element of control in keeping yourself safe.

We are continuing our work training midwives and first aid workers - to provide healthcare to women and children in our villages. We train two midwives in every village we adopt - 100 villages so far. But right now we need to provide these urgently needed items so people can survive the current immense hardship, hardship much greater than many of us have experienced this year.

Please can you help and share this news with your friends? We are so grateful to you for your continued support for families through hard times. Thank you all so much.

Children deserve to be healthy and safe

Goats provide essential milk for children

5 bars of soap to each family - please help!

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May 11, 2020
FGM Criminalized in Sudan!

By Sage Lancaster | Fundraising and Outreach Coordinator

For almost 20 years Kids for Kids has been funding the training of midwives in Darfur for remote villages where there is no healthcare whatsoever. Can you imagine, childbirth with no trained help? Women for decades have been submitted to FGM – Female Genital Mutilation – which can cause serious life-threatening complications when they give birth. Our midwives have been teaching the dangers of FGM and the practice has been dying out in our 100 villages. Now there is the wonderful news that at last in Sudan the newly formed Council of Ministers – created after the overthrow of Omer Bashir last year – have approved a law that would mean up to three years in prison for anyone carrying out FGM. This must still be approved by the Sovereign Council, but it seems likely to become law. This move by the Government to criminalize the practice is a major step for women’s health, making the jobs of our midwives easier. It will take time to completely eradicate the practice; as the United Nations say, 87% of women in Sudan today have undergone FGM, with girls usually cut between the ages of five and 14. We are hugely grateful to you all for supporting our midwives and thus enabling us to save thousands of girls from this dangerous practice.

More Midwives Needed: We are very excited that 30 midwife trainees from villages we adopted in 2018 and 2019 have been selected to be trained by El Fasher Health Academy Staff! The training was due to start in the next two months; however we will keep you updated about this because El Fasher is currently in lockdown as there have been cases of COVID-19 confirmed last week in Darfur. Soon there will be 30 more professionals keeping women and babies safe. Please will you continue to support this life-saving project and help us train these midwives? If we succeed, we hope to raise enough to train a further 40 midwives this year.

Please Note: We are desperate to prevent the virus from reaching villages, as healthcare is so limited people will stand little chance against it. Please visit the Kids for Kids website to learn more about what you can do to help us, and please consider supporting our Urgent Appeal for Soap to Combat COVID-19 on GlobalGiving. Just £20/$25 will provide enough soap for ten families enabling people to wash properly and give them a better chance against the virus. Thank you.

Please help us help more women give birth safely

Links:

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Jan 13, 2020
New Year Update from Kids for Kids

By Sage Lancaster | Fundraising and Outreach Coordinator

You will be pleased to hear that 2020 has started well for Kids for Kids, as for the first time in a long while, Founder and CEO Patricia Parker MBE can again go to Darfur after the previous Government would not issue visas. A trip is being arranged for February. It is going to be an important trip to see everything first hand and report back to you as we have already started work in our eight newly adopted villages, delivering all our integrated projects.

Along with this exciting news we are also thrilled to have started construction on five new Kindergartens and three new Health Units. You may know that these are secondary projects, available to villages after they successfully run our key basic essentials projects for a number of years. Kindergartens are to be built in the villages of Lawabid, Majdoub (A), Kindro, Hillat Kharif, and Kulkul. Health Units will be in Dor Fazy, Mireikhis, and Kamala Kira.

Having said all this, we are still extremely worried about conditions in Darfur. There is no magic wand to provide the infrastructure that is desperately needed, and soaring inflation and lack of vital essentials has led to more hardship. However, you will be happy to hear that we are getting ready to train new midwives in conjunction with the Ministry of Health from our eight villages adopted in 2019. Volunteers are to be selected soon and the 14-month training program to follow will provide these brave and determined women with the knowledge and skills to make a measurable and impactful forever difference to the families in their villages. In fact, in October 2019 alone, our already trained and working midwives in 21 of our villages delivered 154 healthy babies. This simple fact shows just how essential our work is - what would have happened to these babies and their mothers without the midwives you have helped us to train?

When everything is a priority, it is a real challenge to do the best thing possible for people in such need. With your help over the coming year we can ensure that our sustainable projects that have proven immensely success over the almost 19 years of Kids for Kids, can keep on helping more families in more villages in 2020. The best thing you can do to support Kids for Kids this year? Become a monthly donor! Thank you.

With all our best for the year ahead,

The Kids for Kids Team

Hawa, Midwife in Um Keddada Village

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