Mother's Day: Safe Motherhood in Zambia

The Safe Motherhood program in Zambia plans Mother's Day events.

Call for Participation: 3rd Annual White Ribbon Contest for Safe Motherhood Contact an Expert: Rick Hughes, Country Director - Zambia, Maternal and Neonatal Health Program, (260)(1) 254555 Irene Singogo, Coordinator, Zambia WRASM, (260)(1) 251026 Peg Marshall, U.S. contact, Safe Motherhood Initiative, 202-667-1142 Jill Sheffield, President, Family Care International, (212) 941-5300 x11 Country Profile: Zambia Fact Sheets: - Good Quality Maternal Health Services - Maternal Mortality - Skilled Care During Childbirth - Maternal Health: A Vital Social and Economic Investment Resources: - Saving Women's Lives - Maternal and Neonatal Health - State of the World's Mothers 2002 - Every Mother, Every Child Campaign - White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood - Safe Motherhood

May 2 - During this Mother’s Day, there is great cause to reflect on safe motherhood. The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood and its partners are in the field working to ensure safe motherhood. The World Health Organization estimates that in developed countries, one woman in every 1,800 will die from the complications of pregnancy and childbirth. In developing countries, the average risk is one in 48. These disparities are even more striking at the country level. In Switzerland, only one woman in 8,700 will die during pregnancy and childbirth; in Ethiopia, one in every nine will die.

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is a group of organizations and individuals that have combined forces to raise international awareness about the need to make pregnancy and childbirth safe for all women and newborns. The Alliance hopes to make or keep this issue as a priority of international organizations and governments.

In Zambia, the Maternal and Neonatal Health Program (MNH) uses three strategies to improve maternal and neonatal health: strengthening service delivery; behavior change interventions (BCI); and policy and advocacy development.

Strengthening Service Delivery
The MNH Program has defined a core package of key maternal and neonatal healthcare interventions considered essential for improving the quality of basic maternal and newborn care as well as detecting and responding to medical complications and emergencies. Service Delivery interventions work to build providers’ competence in focused antenatal care, birth preparedness and complication readiness, normal labor, birth, postpartum and newborn care, management of complications and care of the sick newborn. Service Delivery interventions also focus on strengthening the quality of facility-based clinical services through a Performance and Quality Improvement (PQI) approach.

Behavior Change Interventions
Behavior Change Interventions (BCI) promotes attitudes, knowledge, skills and capacity that advance preparedness for birth and readiness in the event of complications.

Policy and Advocacy Development
The objective of the MNH Program’s policy interventions is the creation of improved policy environments for maternal and newborn survival. Such environments will facilitate the implementation of program interventions directed at increasing both collaboration among organizations promoting maternal and newborn survival and demand for quality maternal and newborn services. Consequently, policy activities do not stand alone, but cut across the entire range of MNH Program interventions.

Social Mobilization Contest: Safe Motherhood in Zambia
“Every Pregnancy is a Risk...Make it Safe, Plan Ahead.”
The Zambia White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood (ZWRASM) is coordinating a national social mobilization campaign on 12 May 2002, which is both Mother’s Day and International Nurse’s Day. To encourage organizations around the country to participate and to carry out activities at the local level, ZWRASM is sponsoring a competition for the most creative, most effective mobilization activities. Selected activities will be highlighted at the Annual General Meeting of the Alliance, in June, and recognized with an award.

The focus of the campaign is on birth preparedness and complication readiness. Many women die unnecessarily due to delays in recognizing pregnancy complications, getting to a health care facility, or receiving the care they need from a skilled provider. We can begin to reduce these delays, and save the lives of women and children, by helping families and communities to plan ahead and be prepared for complications if they develop, and by working with health service managers and skilled providers to ensure adequate care is available when needed.

We encourage you to participate in this contest. All you need to do to enter the contest is to plan a social mobilization activity relevant to the theme, carry it out on 12 May, and report back to the Alliance on what you did and the outcomes and the impact you have made. The Alliance is distributing copies of the attached tool kit as a guide, which contains standard technical information and ideas for different types of effective social mobilization activities. At the end of this kit is a simple reporting form that you can use to enter the contest.

All entries must be received at the ZWRASM Secretariat no later than 31 May 2002 to be eligible for the contest.

Contact: Irene Singogo, Coordinator, Zambia WRASM, (260)(1) 251026