Make Motherhood Safe for Tanzanian Women

Greetings from Kupona Foundation!

We hope everyone is having a great start to the New Year! Thank you all for your generous support to Kupona Foundation and CCBRT over the past year. We had a great year while we continued our work to support vulnerable Tanzanians.

Here’s what we accomplished at CCBRT over the past three:

• CCBRT’s Maternal and Newborn Wing has performed 1255 deliveries since it opened in January 2022 and have moved from an average of 2 deliveries a day to 3 a day.
• Despite not having been as aggressive as we would like in patient recruitment due to limited resources, 10% of the women who delivered at the Maternal and Newborn Wing in 2023 were teenagers aged 13-19 years old, and of those, almost 40% received a cesarean section.
• The Family Planning, reproductive clinic provided 431 clients with family planning services including Implanon, UIDs, condoms and other services.
• In 2023, CCBRT conducted 462 fistula/perineal trauma surgeries and an additional 19 fistula patients were operated on in Lindi during two fistula surgical camps. Further, 23 former fistula patients graduated from Mabinti.

We have also begun implementing some new initiatives as well as improving others. These include:

• Increasing our outreach to ensure all women suffering from fistula are treated using standard guidelines. To do this, we conducted a baseline survey for planned capacity building for clinical teams in Tanzania’s Lake Region with capacity building activities scheduled to start in Q1 of 2024. We also participated in the IDEOF commemoration in Kigoma region involving all Fistula stakeholders including UNFPA, AMREF, Bugando and the Ministry of Health. We raised awareness about Fistula and fistula treatment through 11 road shows in four regions, participated in a NGO Forum in Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma, and engaged with the Ministry of Health for the Dissemination of Fistula Treatment Guidelines.
• We have increased our efforts to increase capacity of Community Health Workers on fistula identification. In 2023, the CCBRT team trained 300 Community Health Workers in five regions on fistula identification as well as conducted physical outreach to post fistula patients in those regions.
• CCBRT increased its capacity to provide specialized services in for neonatal patients through the onboarding of our new pediatrician at the beginning of December. She is conducting neonatal ward rounds and is teaching the team on how to correctly conduct brain ultrasounds.
• To date, women and babies have been treated within the Maternal Wing, however in 2024, CCBRT will open the neonatal ward and add an additional 3-4 neonatal nurses to the team. Once in place, an exposure training at the Muhibbili National Hospital will be conducted.
• And, in January of this month, CCBRT will open two new clinics! We will begin providing services to those with high-risk pregnancies as well as those experiencing issues with infertility. The clinics will operate once a week and anyone in need of the services will be provided with specialized care adapted to fit their unique conditions.

As we ramp up for 2024, we will continue to increase our impact to reach even more women with CCBRT’s services. Additionally, we plan to strengthen our antenatal clinic, family planning and SRH education, as well as daily data tracking. Additionally, we will conduct in-house training on critical and emergency skills for new staff to ensure all of our patients receive the highest quality of care and design new tools and services for women with disabilities in order to better serve them.

Thank you again for your continued support of Kupona Foundation and the important work happening every day at CCBRT.

Greeting from Kupona Foundation! 

First and foremost, thank you for your generous support to Kupona Foundation and CCBRT! We have had a busy summer as we continue our work to support vulnerable Tanzanians. 

Here’s what we accomplished at CCBRT over the past three to six months: 

• CCBRT’s Maternal and Newborn Wing has performed 912 deliveries since it opened in January 2022, 271 occurred from June through August. 
• The Maternal and Newborn Wing also performed 3324 outpatient consultations and supported 28 teenage girls and 10 pregnant women with disabilities with antenatal, obstetric, and postnatal care from June through August.
• The Family Planning, reproductive clinic provided 134 women with contraceptives ranging from contraceptive injections, pills, implants and IUDs from June through August.
• From January to August, CCBRT conducted 342 fistula/perineal trauma surgeries and the first cohort of 12 rehabilitated post-fistula women graduated from the Mabinti livelihoods program in June and the second cohort of 11 women will graduate in November.

We have also begun implementing some new initiatives as well as improving others. These include:

• Strengthening our family planning services to increase postpartum family planning. To do this, we ran a rapid cycle improvement and identified key gaps needing to be addressed. As such, we are now tracking the number of women who selected a contraceptive method before going into labor as well as the number provided with postpartum family planning services each day.
• We have increased our efforts to reduce anemia and blood transfusions in the third trimester. We saw an increase in women coming to CCBRT in labor with low hemoglobin levels. To mitigate this problem, we have strengthened antenatal treatment to identify symptoms more quickly as well as iron therapy for those determined to have an iron deficiency.
• Many of the women visiting CCBRT are unprepared for what to expect on the day of giving birth, so we have started conducting birth preparedness sessions for women and birth companies. These sessions provide them with the opportunity to ask questions, discuss concerns, and obtain informed pre-consent for vaginal examinations and other procedures common during labor.
• To further encourage breastfeeding, CCBRT has begun conducting in-house training with videos conveying the importance of mom and baby to stay together during the golden hour post-birth. The mom is trained to keep her baby on her chest until breastfeeding is established without disturbing the baby before it successfully latches and finishes nursing.
• To ensure all patients are provided with the unique care for each of their individual needs, the CCBRT team of specialists reviews the status and treatment plan of all of the high-risk antenatal clinic clients each week at their Thursday morning meeting.

As we look toward these final months of 2023 and into 2024, we will continue to increase our impact to reach even more women with CCBRT’s services. Additionally, we plan to strengthen our antenatal clinic, family planning and SRH education, as well as daily data tracking. Additionally, we will conduct in-house training on critical and emergency skills for new staff to ensure all of our patients receive the highest quality of care.

Thank you again for your continued support of Kupona Foundation and the important work happening every day at CCBRT.