Part 3/5 – How BRAC Turns “Oppression into Opportunity”: #3 Fighting Maternal Mortality

This blog post is part 3 in a 5 part series, Five Ways that BRAC Turns “Oppression into Opportunity” for Women.#1 Confronting Male Violence against Women
#2 Empowering Women Economically
#3 Fighting Maternal Mortality and Providing Healthcare to the PoorestThe equivalent of five jumbo jets’ worth of women die in child labor each day*. Sierra Leone’s maternal mortality ratio is the highest in the world, with one in eight women dying during pregnancy or childbirth.When BRAC started, women in Bangladesh were having 6 babies on average; today they are having 2. BRAC is now providing maternal health care in places such as Afghanistan, Southern Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda where women are still having 6 children.BRAC uses 74,000 community health volunteers to provide basic health services, including prenatal and antenatal care, to more than 92 million poor people.For example:

Eliamulika Noeli is one of BRAC’s community health volunteers in Tengeru, Tanzania. Every month, she visits between 150 and 200 households – reaching up to 1,000 people.

She keeps tabs on all the families she visits, paying special attention to women who are pregnant or new mothers. She provides prenatal care and refers pregnant women to give birth in local hospitals, where they have less of a chance of dying from complications during childbirth. She also provides antenatal care and ensures that all children under five in the households she visits are properly vaccinated.

In addition to providing life-saving information to the women and their families in her community, Noeli and the 74,000 other community health volunteers supplement their income by selling health related products – like soap, contraceptives, and oral rehydration salts – that BRAC provides them with. Here you can see Noeli selling de-worming medication, one of her best sellers, to her microfinance group members.

* From Half the Sky, forthcoming book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn