African leaders to carve out solutions for child and maternal health
Leaders from across the African continent have gathered in Ethiopia to review the Maputo Plan of Action and to discuss the challenges and possible solutions to the poor state of child and maternal health.
Beginning today and ending Wednesday, members of the African Union will convene in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for the Continental Conference on Maternal and Child Health in Africa. The conference will review the Maputo Plan of Action on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, which expires this year.
This year’s review conference will take place under the theme of “Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)] through the Accelerated Reduction of Maternal and Child Mortality in Africa.”
The Maputo Plan of Action (PoA) is an operational framework for ensuring universal access among women to sexual and reproductive health services. The plan aims to engage stakeholders at all levels (government, civil society and the private sector) to these ends. Family planning, the streamlining of health services provision including those for HIV/AIDS, the achievement of the MDGs, sexual education for youth, addressing the risks of unsafe and illegal abortions, child survival, health personnel training and community-based service provision are all essential tenets of the Maputo PoA.
Delegates from the African nations will share their success and challenges and develop a set of best practices in hopes of catalyzing progress in the fields of maternal, reproductive and sexual health. Decisive and effective actions cannot come soon enough, for the World Health Organization recently lamented that in the last 30 years, very little substantial advancement have been made. For example, in Tanzania, the maternal mortality rate is 470 per 100 000 women—believe it or not, this is a modest improvement from 2000, which recorded 750 deaths per 100 000 women. On average, across the continent, African women have a 1 in 16 chance of dying during childbirth.
Note, though, that the poor state of maternal health has lead to gross inadequacies in child welfare.
For instance, more than 12 million children are orphaned by AIDS in Africa alone, where the AIDS pandemic has disproportionately affected young women, who are the primary caregivers to children. Motherless children sometimes end up in orphanages because their fathers cannot work and care for them. The feminization of the AIDS pandemic has also had devastating implications for women’s health and mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus.
Treating food insecurity, and any cultural biases against women that impede their ability to access nutritious foods, should also be treated as top priority issues. Each year, 1 million newborn children die within the first year of their birth, often because their mothers were too malnourished during pregnancy, leading to newborns’ physical underdevelopment and immune deficiencies; this phenomenon can also be explained by mothers dying during childbirth or mothers who have remained malnourished after childbirth, leading to a shortage of breast milk to nourish their children.
The recommendations of the African Union Conference are of the utmost importance, for they will be the roadmap for improving child and maternal health in the next decade. As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in his 2003 address on International Women’s Day, “When women thrive, all of society benefits, and succeeding generations are given a better start in life.”
SOS Children's Villages, Canada
19 April 2010
