Ahead of the Inaugural Global Midwifery Conference, Her Excellency Mrs Toyin Saraki, the Founder-Director of the Wellbeing Foundation Africa (WBFA), and ICM Global Goodwill Ambassador, outlines the importance of investing in midwifery.
HE Toyin Saraki expressed the following points:
- The value of midwives in Nigeria is being shown in the unlikeliest of places – camps for internally displaced people (IDP) uprooted by Boko Haram militants.
- Around one in five babies are dying during childbirth in northeast Nigeria, where the Islamist group has waged a six-year insurgency, yet the survival rate of pregnancies delivered in IDP camps in the region is almost 100 percent
- At this conference, the midwives will not only learn how to save a mother and child’s life, but also how to detect women at risk of domestic violence and female genital mutilation (FGM)
- While Nigeria has started training midwives in life-saving emergency obstetric care in recent years, it still lacks enough midwives or an even distribution across the nation
- Midwives will be the army to change dire health outcomes, if we invest in them and provide them with skills
- Nigerian midwives need to be able to stand on an equal footing with midwives from around the world
For further information, please see the full Reuters’ interview here: http://news.trust.org/item/20160503112035-7mz38/?source=hpOtherNews1
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