Healthcare to Save Mothers and Babies

Our village midwives are an asset which is highly prized by the women in our villages in Darfur. To us it is unimaginable that women in Darfur face pregnancy and childbirth without having any trained person on hand to provide advice and guidance and as a consequence any problems encountered frequently result in the loss of the baby and in many cases also the death of the mother. All this changes when Kids for Kids adopts a village and trains two women as village midwives who provide regular ante-natal check-ups snd are able to detect potential problems and take appropriate action. It is no wonder that women value them so highly. One of the many village midwives we have funded delivered 120 babies in two remote villages in the 28 months since she had graduated. Moreover, she had arranged for 5 pregnant women facing complications to undertake the long journey to hospital in time to deliver their babies safely - without her skill the outcome is likely to have been very different. Although our midwives have to rely on the speedy cross bred donkey which we provide to reach their clients, we have provided them with 21st century technology in the form of a mobile phone which enables them to be able to contact the local hospital for advice and for referrals of women facing complications. Our last batch of village midwives graduated in March and we are still awaiting a report from the Ministry of Health on the performance of all the midwives we have trained before going ahead with the next training course.  We already have the trainees identified - some from the three new villages which we adopted in 2013 and others fill gaps in our established villages where a midwife may, for example, have left the area on marriage. We are also still in discussion with the Ministry of Health about the possibility of Kids for Kids funding a second Midwifes Training School in Mellit.