Afghanistan-Midwife Program Addresses High Infant Mortality-Trainees’ Male Relatives Support
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: June 11, 2007
Afghan Midwives Target High Infant Mortality
June 10, 2007 · Afghanistan’s youngest citizens are
the ones in the most peril. The war-ravaged country has one of the highest
infant-mortality rates in the world. That’s because nearly nine out of ten
Afghan women give birth without medical help.
Now, Afghan health officials and Western aid groups are trying to change
that. They’ve developed a program to train midwives. Women learn how to assist
in childbirth — and men learn to support the women in their work.
At one hospital in Jalalabad, trainees come from among Afghanistan’s most
underserved and dangerous provinces. These are places where illiteracy is
rampant, and women’s roles are limited to that of subservient wife and mother.
The head trainer at the hospital, an obstetrician named Dr. Hafiza Sahak,
believes her trainees are the only hope to curb her country’s staggering infant
mortality rate.
“Three years before, when we started we started this midwifery education
program, we prepared some advertisements and flyers printed and distributed in
remote areas,” Sahak says. “You know, in the first entrance exam, just six
students coming from the whole region. And we needed 48 students.”
Now, she has so many applicants she has to turn them away. Sahak says her
secret was winning the cooperation of the trainees’ male relatives. For example,
each girl’s father — or if she’s married, her husband and father-in-law — sign
or mark a contract pledging the trainee will work after graduation. The head of
the tribe is also required to sign off on the deal.
In exchange, the program director houses the girls in a walled compound off
limits to men. Female relatives and in-laws visit periodically, to make sure the
girls are behaving.
As an added bonus, trainees with children have full-time, on-site day care at
their
disposal.
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