May 2012

Honor your mom today by supporting MSH's work to help support healthy mothers---like Imukalayi Eponga (right)---and their children around the world.

Support healthy moms and their kids.

Imukalayi was trained on "kangaroo mother care" by MSH in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kangaroo mother care is a simple technique that emphasizes human contact to keep the baby warm.

This year, 7.5 million children will die - 99 percent in developing countries. In Africa alone, 1 in 8 children will die before their 5th birthday. Two-thirds of these deaths are preventable.

For over 40 years, MSH has seen that when mothers receive low-cost, high-impact interventions-like kangaroo mother care training-their children will likely survive until age 5 and beyond.

Apegnon Akpene is a 20-year-old mother of three children: four-year-old Joseph, two-year-old Romance, and one-month-old Akou Jacqeline. Since attending USAID's Action for West Africa Region, Phase II (AWARE II)  community health worker training, she has become a client of family planning -- and a role model for family planning in her community.

Akpene is one of three community health workers in Diguegue, a small village of about 800 people in the hills of the southwestern forest separating Togo and Ghana. Distance and difficult terrain are major hindrances to accessing health care for the inhabitants of the village. Diguegue is 47 kilometers from the nearest health facility, a small clinic, in the Prefecture of Tchifama. The village is served by a 12-kilometer dirt road that winds through the thick forest.

Akpene attended school for eight years. When she became pregnant at age 16, she was forced to drop out. She gave birth to three children within four years.

At the 65th World Health Assembly this week, Management Sciences for Health (MSH) and civil society organizations from three continents launched a joint call to action on universal health coverage (UHC). The statement -- initiated by Action for Global Health, Centre for Health & Social Services (CHeSS), Doctors of the World, Medicus Mundi International, Oxfam, Save the Children, and MSH -- calls on political and world leaders, governments and ministries of health, and civil society to take a stand for UHC.

When Arifa arrived in August 2010 at Family Awareness Consciousness Togetherness (FACT), a USAID-funded non-governmental organization (NGO) that receives technical support from the MSH-led GHARP II Project, it was immediately evident that she had major communication challenges. At age 17, Arifa found it difficult to have even brief conversations with anyone.

The Berbice Technical Institute had sent Arifa to FACT as a work-study student for a two-month term. At the time, she was studying for a Certificate in Information Technology (IT).

FACT assigned Arifa to be an assistant teacher in their computer program with 40 orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), ages twelve to fifteen. Most of the time, Arifa could be found sitting in a corner all alone. When she did speak, the children made fun of her.