While many of the risks associated with childbirth have been significantly reduced by modern medicine, for many women around the globe bringing a child into the world is still a dangerous endeavour.
Habiba Maalim works as a nurse midwife coordinator in Trócaire s hospitals in Somalia, helping to deliver babies in a country where women are more than 150 times more likely to die in childbirth than in Ireland.
These are her words.
When I read about how frequently women in Somalia die in childbirth, I knew I had to go there to help.
I’m from Kenya but I moved to Gedo, a remote and hot part of Somalia, to start working with Trócaire. Gedo is an incredibly poor area and has been affected by decades of conflict. Ravaged by conflict, drought and hunger, Somalia is one of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world. Life expectancy here is only 57 years, and over two in every three people live in poverty.
While many of the risks associated with childbirth have been significantly reduced by modern medicine, for many women around the globe bringing a child into the world is still a dangerous endeavour.
Habiba Maalim works as a nurse midwife coordinator in Trócaire s hospitals in Somalia, helping to deliver babies in a country where women are more than 150 times more likely to die in childbirth than in Ireland.
These are her words.
When I read about how frequently women in Somalia die in childbirth, I knew I had to go there to help.
I’m from Kenya but I moved to Gedo, a remote and hot part of Somalia, to start working with Trócaire. Gedo is an incredibly poor area and has been affected by decades of conflict. Ravaged by conflict, drought and hunger, Somalia is one of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world. Life expectancy here is only 57 years, and over two in every three people live in poverty.
Poorer countries need more vaccines. Here’s how we do it.
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Today we mark Zero Discrimination Day, as the world faces a huge moral test in rolling out Covid vaccines. 75% of all vaccinations so far have been in just 10 countries. How to address this inequality? We ramp up production by allowing more countries to produce generic vaccines.
You may have never heard of Gedo, but it’s the size of Ireland. It’s a remote, dusty, hot region of Somalia, affected by decades of conflict and grinding poverty, where courageous frontline workers now face the threat of Covid.
In Trócaire’s hospitals in Gedo, Habiba Maalim works as a nurse midwife coordinator, helping to safely delivery babies in a country where women are over 150 times more likely to die in childbirth than in Ireland. Habiba and her co-workers badly need Covid vaccines, but it is a mark of our deeply unequal world that they’re not going to be able to get them anytime soon.