Work Permit permitting, I will start a new job in the next few weeks as Program Manager for Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health for Africare Zambia. I am so excited! It is a big job but a clear one, with one major donor, strong direction from the Ministry of Health but huge challenges to address in order to reduce Maternal Mortality in the communities that Africare works in. Witchcraft and Taboos impact heavily on Birth Plan decisions here.

It is a big job but it will be great – it is a NZAID funded project .focusing on reducing maternal mortality using all sorts of processes that are similar to what we did at Alola both in MCH and in Advocacy – so I am very excited!

The budget over three years is US$2.5 million – so big dollars and big expectations – reducing MMR by 15-20% in the target areas – working with 5000 pregnant women who will be tracked from their fourth month of pregnancy until  the child is two years old to make sure that mother and child access all necessary health interventions including safe delivery at a health clinic.

The program is setting up Safe Motherhood Action Groups linking women to a health centre and making sure that all women have birth plans and transport plans in place to access health facilities. And we have bicycle ambulances here! The roads are bad but the areas are much flatter so riding bikes is a good way to get around – and a long narrow trailer has been designed as a bed for a woman to lie on while taken by bicycle to the clinic.

Overall it is an amazing project and has many different elements and includes child nutrition training – inlcuding feeding programs where communities bring their local foods together and teach each other how to cook nutritious meals which are fed to children who have been identified as malnourished.  Children begin to gain weight, parents learn about the importance of varied nutrition and new cooking techniques. Agricultural programs are also introduced to increase the agricultural skills of communities so they begin to produce adequate amounts of varied foods all year round. It is a great program. Very comprehensive.

So there is much work to do - but it should be very exciting.