Make Uganda safe for mothers

As Uganda grapples with challenges of poor health service delivery, a new report released this week ranks Uganda one of the toughest places for mothers. The State of the World’s Mothers 2013 report – the 14th annual Mothers’ Index by Save the Children – placed Uganda in 132nd position out of the 176 countries that were graded.

This ranking is a grim reminder that Uganda’s maternal mortality ratio remains one of our biggest national challenges. Though Uganda is doing slightly better than other East African countries like Kenya at (156th), Tanzania (135th) and Burundi (137th), this report demonstrates what we have known for a long time: we still have a lot to do to achieve safe motherhood.

The government has introduced programmes to promote safe motherhood and improve maternal/child health which, as the index notes, has registered major gains for mothers and older children.

There is, however, minimal gain for newborns, which obviously hampers steps towards achieving the much-touted Millennium Development Goals four and five - to reduce childhood deaths and improve maternal health respectively.

Part of the problem, according to the report, is lack of nutrition, which has contributed to high mother and child mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, including Uganda- with 10-20 per cent of mothers underweight.

But there are more fundamental challenges such as lack of proper health services due to shortage of professional health workers and health facilities in rural areas.

A recent research by White Ribbon Alliance, a healthcare services agency, indicates that 63 per cent of women in rural areas give birth at home.

This trend must be reversed given the risks associated with unattended child birth.

With 16 mothers dying every day in Uganda during delivery and 106 children under the age of five dying within the first 28 days of birth annually; and another 41 dying on the day they are born every day, the scale of the problem can best be illustrated by the agony of mothers in rural Uganda who lose their lives during childbirth because they cannot easily access a health centre. We should recognise that safe motherhood is a right!

The government should quickly shift focus to maternal health. Allocating more money to the health sector, specifically for improving maternal health, would be a good starting point to eventually reducing the high maternal mortality rate.