Birthing Kits - providing a clean and safe birth

The Clean Birth Kit Program

Around 300,000 women die from preventable causes during pregnancy and childbirth each year and a further 2.5 million babies die within the first 4 weeks of life. These rates are far higher in low and middle-income countries, where poverty and gender inequality is often coupled with a lack of access to health care.  

Huge disparities in the level of maternal and neonatal mortality persist across regions and counties of our world today.  It is this inequality that is the driving force behind our Clean Birth Kit Program.  

Our Clean Birth Kits are simple and effective tools for basic infection prevention and first-line childbirth care. Each component has been selected to support the 6 principles of cleanliness at birth for mothers, newborns, and birth attendants in high-risk and emergency settings. Each kit contains:

• Soap to wash the birth attendant’s hands and the mother’s perineum.
• A plastic Sheet to provide a hygienic surface for the mother to birth her baby.
• Gloves to cover the birth attendant’s hands and provide protection from infections such as HIV for carers and care recipients.
• Gauze to wipe clear the newborn baby’s eyes, and to clean the mother’s perineum prior to giving birth.
• Cord ties to cleanly tie the umbilical cord.
• A sterile blade to cut the umbilical cord cleanly and reduce risk of newborn tetanus and infection.

The current global need for birthing kits is high. According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, “(a) decade on from the Clean Birth Kits Policy Briefing, the six cleans are now more important than ever to keep mothers and babies safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, some of our global partners have reported that there is an increased need for the distribution of CBKs, due to restricted movement (lockdown) and their inability to travel to heath facilities.

Links:

• Donate here

In 2020, the child mortaility rate in the Congo was estimated to be 100 deaths per 1,000 live births, which means that one tenth of children are not expected to make it to their fifth birthday. For 16 years, Birthing Kit Foundation Australia has been working with the Mission in Health Care and Development (MHCD), an organisation dedicated to reducing poverty in the Democratic Republic of Congo through community development, health care and education activities. 

Last month - June 2021, Birthing Kit Foundation Australia (BKFA) sent 4000 clean birth kits to Congo. The kits were packed by volunteers from across Australia and were distributed to different maternity hospitals, health care centres and to Traditional Midwives in Congo. These kits contributed to saving the lives of thousands of women and their babies. For the midwives in this region of the world, it had been almost a year since they were able to access these kits for community distribution, due to COVID and the difficulties it created in transporting goods and services around the globe. 

The vision of the MHCD is to see a flourishing, independent and empowered community, working towards the empowerment of women and the promotion of gender equality, a vision in line with that of the work undertaken by BKFA.

BKFA work with field partners across Africa, India, Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea working towards a world in which all women and girls have access to a clean and safe birth. Your donations contribute towards the pack and supply of clean birth kits to pregnant women in rural communities around the world, with every $5 providing a kit to a woman in need.

Photo - Rachel Glasby, The Silk Road

Links:

• BKFA Website