Zimbabwe
Saving the lives of pregnant mothers and newborns
12,600 newborns can be saved over 10 years by training local nurses and healthcare workers in emergency life-saving skills
4,500 mothers over the next decade will no longer die from pregnancy and childbirth complications
Zimbabwe is one of the few countries in the world where a woman's risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes has escalated in recent years. Our new programme aims to reverse this trend and save the lives of thousands of pregnant women and newborns. Currently, a pregnant woman in Zimbabwe is almost 100 times more likely to die because of pregnancy or birth complications than in the UK. Newborns are 10 times more likely to die. Yet a majority of these deaths can be prevented.
In collaboration with a range of organisations, our goal is to address the immediate need for life-saving care from early 2012, while also putting in place a solution for the medium to long term. We will achieve this by
- tackling Zimbabwe's severe shortage of skilled nurses and healthcare workers
- introducing simple and affordable life-saving equipment that can be adopted at scale to address the problem nationally
Our impact
We aim for all district hospitals to be staffed by clinical officers within three years so that all pregnant women and newborns will have access to life-saving care. These clinical officers are midwives skilled in the provision of caesarean section and other critical emergency surgical procedures. We focus on training clinical officers because 90 per cent stay working in rural areas where they are most needed, whereas 95 per cent of doctors move away.
- This intervention alone should save 4,500 mothers and 12,600 newborns over ten years. In addition 9,000 children will avoid being orphaned.
- A linked initiative to upgrade equipment and skills in 20 district hospitals aims to cut newborn deaths from lack of oxygen at birth by up to half.
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