Southern Ethiopia - Gwent Health Link

Maternal mortality rate in Ethiopia is 561 women per 100,000 live births. It is one of the highest in the world. 1 in 27 women will die from pregnancy related complications. There are only a handful of hospitals for the 81 million, mostly rural population.

90% of rural women give birth at home with no skilled birth attendant. Less than 30% have any kind of antenatal care during pregnancy and less than 5% have any postnatal care after delivery. Women who have any care during their delivery, are mostly attended by traditional birth attendants. If they do manage to attend one of the health centres, which are usually more than 5-10km from home, they may be lucky enough to be taken care of by a nurse or a midwife. However, these midwives/ nurses themselves often would have had inadequate skills training and even lesser clinical experience. Moreover, there are no doctors in any of these health centres.

Our Role

We organised a pilot skills training workshop in emergency obstetrics for midwives working in health centres and local hospitals around Hawassa in March 2006 after needs assessment. This programme was very successful and has led to annual emergency obstetrics skills training workshops for midwives working in rural health care facilities across SNNPR and beyond. Participants are also taught to train others in emergency obstetric skills and are expected to train at least two other nurses in their own place of work, thus cascading our efforts onto a much larger number of health providers.

We provide on-site training to midwives and nurses as part of the Exemplar Health Centres project.

We have trained over 150 midwives and nurses have been trained in these workshops. We have provided a large number training manikins including pelvises and dolls for the Hawassa Health Sciences College to continue with training throughout the year.

We have now also support training of the community women health extension workers. We trained 84 community health extension workers attached to health centres in 'Safe and Clean delivery'' and in the early recognition of maternal and child problems at home thus facilitating early referral to the health centres.