RAISE Projects
Constance completes training at the RAISE Training Centre in Kenya
The public health service struggles to provide services in this war-torn region, so for six years Constance has been helping to fill the gap. As well as immunising children against diseases like polio, diphtheria, and typhoid and treating them when they have fevers and malaria, she offers women access to family planning. Constance advises women on the best way to manage their fertility and offers contraceptive methods (including long-term and permanent methods) that simply aren't available anywhere else. In so doing, Constance and MSU are meeting a huge unmet need and saving women’s lives.
But that hasn’t been enough for Constance. She travelled to the RAISE Training Centre in Nairobi, Kenya to learn how to manage complications that occur during childbirth and to share her experiences with other people. Now she has a qualification that demonstrates her abilities, and she has the skills to help even more women and save even more lives.
Constance is just one of thousands of people who work tirelessly for Marie Stopes International to help save and improve women's lives in difficult and dangerous situations around the world.
By Chris Duncan, Communications Manager at Marie Stopes International
Written for Nicholas Kristof's New York Times blog, Globalization and Human Rights
With Marie Stopes Uganda (MSU), RAISE is helping expand access to comprehensive reproductive health services in four districts in war-torn northern Uganda.
On the ground
Most of Uganda has flourished over the last decade, but in northern Uganda hostilities between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army have threatened peace and security. Fighting besieged the north in 1986, and at its worst, forced 1.2 million people to flee their homes and livelihoods. Despite the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement signed in 2006, an estimated 625,000 people still cannot return home.
Access to medical services in northern Uganda, including reproductive health (RH) care, is extremely limited. Health facilities struggle to stock even the most basic family planning methods and few health workers are trained to provide them. Emergency care for life-threatening complications during pregnancy and delivery is only available at one facility in the region, the referral hospital. Many humanitarian organisations in the north provide basic health services but still overlook care for unsafe abortions, despite its well-known potential to save lives.
How RAISE is helping
Along with Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief (CPAR), RAISE and MSU support four health centres run by the Ministry of Health in northern Uganda (specifically Amuru, Kitgum, Lira, and Pader Districts).
Marie Stopes Uganda Health Centre
Centres provide basic emergency obstetric care, including post-abortion care and care for survivors of sexual violence. Some centres send mobile health units to isolated, rural districts to deliver family planning to clients who would otherwise not have access.
MSU also collaborates with other humanitarian organisations in northern Uganda to make care available in displaced persons camps.
To ensure all components needed to deliver comprehensive RH care are in place, the project secures supplies and equipment and trains health workers at the RAISE Training Centre in Kenya and at home in Uganda.
The project also utilises radio, community health workers, theatre, and brochures to raise awareness amongst communities about RH and project services.
Country Context
- Women have an average of seven children, the third highest in Africa.
- Less than 10% of women living in displaced persons camps currently use a modern method of family planning.
- Only one third of women in northern Uganda deliver their babies in health facilities.
- Up to 30% of maternal deaths are due to unsafe abortion.
- The displaced people who return home often face unimaginable difficulties: No clean water, no health clinics, nor schools for their children.
RAISE Partner
Marie Stopes Uganda has been providing comprehensive RH services to internally displaced people in northern Uganda since 2002. (mariestopes.org)
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