Ghana’s Most Important Issue via The Maternal Health Channel

A wonderful initiative by Creative Storm is the Maternal Health Channel on GTV on Thursdays at 8PM and on TV3 on Fridays at 8.30 PM. The program sheds light on maternal health in Ghana, or rather the lack of it.

The series started with the story of Charity, a woman who did not survive giving birth.

Maternal Health Channel host Ivy in front of the government clinic in Kute Buem.
Maternal Health Channel host Ivy in front of the government clinic in Kute Buem.

MHC write on their very active Facebook page:

“Every maternal death is an intensely personal tragedy and it is essential to hear the stories of those who have suffered in order to illuminate an issue that is both immediate and far more complex than it seems on the surface.
We can change; Ghana can achieve Millennium Development Goal #5, the reduction of maternal mortality by 75% in the year 2015. The first step is EVERYONE having a discussion about an epidemic that is far too often overlooked. The first step is with YOU.”

As a mother and a daughter and a citizen of the world, it angers me terribly that women should have to give up their life when giving life. We know it takes 9 months, we know you need vitamins and clean water, we know giving birth is a risk and a hard job, we know how to create the best possible chances for both mother and baby to survive – still women are  dying for no good reason at all.

This week, they go to Kute Buem in the Volta region, see pic. 

Personally, I think The Maternal Health Channel is one of the most important media initiatives in Ghana I have ever seen. It is massive, well thought out and quite digital (facebook, vimeo, tumblr, on Twitter use hashtag #mhcghana). If you agree with my sentiments or, better yet, with their mission to save more mothers and babies in Ghana, please spread this information to your networks, discuss online, blog on it and watch the program!

I have written on this topic before Why Are Mothers Still Dying? and When I Donated Blood and Ganyobinaa also wrote about MHC.

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Malaria in Ghana

Yesterday evening, I started feeling ill. My throat was dry and my body was aching. Just a little while later, my cheeks suddenly felt very hot and I found my thinking slowing down and I just knew it – I have malaria!

The fear of contracting malaria was the biggest obstacle for me moving here. I had heard about dying children, the importance of profylaxis from travel websites like this and could not make it fit with what my Ghanaian friend talked about as “a cold, nothing worse”. The first time I had malaria, was also the first time I was back in Sweden after almost a year in Ghana. We travelled from a 30 degree celsius tropical night to a bright and crisp winterday of about 10 degrees below zero! I thought it was pretty normal to feel cold! That time, because it took me almost a week to understand my symptoms, I was hospitalized from “severe malaria” and learned about how the parasites multiply exponentially leading to that you can get very ill quickly after you fall sick.

Fast forward five years, I have had malaria a couple of times (for instance in May 2010) surrounded by much less drama – Now I am too thinking of it not much more than of a cold, well the kind you need to take medicin for. However, although malaria is no more a serious problem to me, malaria is a serious problem to Ghana. In 2007, UNICEF estimated that every year 3,5 million Ghanaians get malaria and 20 000 children die from it, that is 25% of deaths in children under 5 years, although newer numbers suggest 33%. Sadly the cost of treatment or distance to a health facility will be the cause of non-treatment. Another interesting –  and devastating – aspect of malaria is the hidden costs. UNICEF says:

• A malaria-stricken family spends an average
of over one quarter of its income on malaria
treatment, as well as paying prevention costs
and suffering loss of income.
• Malaria-afflicted families on average can only
harvest 40 per cent of the crops harvested by
healthy families.
• In endemic areas, as much as 60 per cent of
children’s schooling may be impaired as a
result of repeated bouts of malaria.
• Malaria-endemic countries are among the
worlds most impoverished. The cost of malaria
control and treatment slows economic growth
by about 1.3 per cent a year in Africa.

Initiatives such as the (American) president’s malaria initiative are trying to roll back malaria and Ghana has recently had successes in distributing mosquito nets and giving pregnant women precautionary malaria treatments (I took them, myself), but are they enough? When you see open gutters being constructed as I write this (a prime breeding ground for mosquitos) and trash everywhere (another favorite place where mosquitos breed) – it feels like we are going backwards rather than forwards.

And I feel I have to go lie down a little bit.

Also read fellow bloggers Gameli, Maya, Antirhythm, Maameous and Mad in Ghana on malaria.

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International Women’s Day: Why Are Mothers Still Dying?

Birth in Lagos from Alice Proujansky on Vimeo.

Today is March 8th, international women’s day. It is a day to rejoice for the amazing advances women as a group has made over the last 100 years, but also to focus on important issues of tomorrow.

My husband always says that equal pay must be the starting point for any viable change towards equality for women. But after seeing Alice Proujansky’s scary and beautiful birth clinic pictures from around the world (see slideshow above from Nigeria, where 1 in 13 women die during pregnancy or in childbirth), listening to Christy Turlington/EveryMotherCounts on Aljaazerah this morning (sign her petition!) and since last year pondering on the success of Ghana’s free health care policy for mothers, I still wonder if global maternity health is not the most important issue for the women of tomorrow.

According to Turlington:

“an additional investment of $1.3 billion per year would save the lives of an estimated 250,000 women and babies per year.”

Then why are mothers still dying to give birth to human kind?

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