UN's Ban calls for improving women's and children's health in Africa

[News_Editor]

UN's Ban calls for improving women's and children's health in Africa

2011-05-26 07:20:20 GMT+7 (ICT)

UNITED NATIONS (BNO NEWS) -- United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday visited health workers in Ethiopia and spotlighted the progress made in improving the health of women and children, while also stressing the need to do more to avoid needless deaths.

With an Ethiopian woman dying every 25 minutes due to complications related to child birth, Ban stressed that too many women and children were dying needlessly from preventable diseases.

"Training good health workers [and] training good midwives can save a lot of women's and also children's lives," Ban said during a press conference at the Ambo Mesk health post in Bahir Dar, in Ethiopia's northern state of Amhara.

Ban met with the staff providing essential services to communities previously living without ready access to such care at the health post, and he also visited a larger health center, a few kilometers away, which supports the health post by providing it with supplies and on-the-job training. During his visit, he spoke with doctors and nurses about their work, as well as with some patients.

"I hope that the Government will try to expend these posts, clinics and centers and also hospitals," said the UN Secretary-General, who also spotlighted maternal health when he visited Nigeria earlier this week.

Ban commended Ethiopia on its commitment to improve maternal and child health, including its goal of quadrupling the number of midwives, saying the African country was a good example of how a little investment can go a long way in saving many lives.

Currently, the UN Secretary-General is in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, where he is attending an African Union meeting on peace and security. On the sidelines of that meeting, he met with the Vice President of South Africa, the President of Equatorial Guinea, the President of Senegal and the Prime Minister of Ethiopia.

On Tuesday, Ban visited Nigeria, where he told a national forum of governors that the country deserved credit for its efforts to improve health care, especially for women and children.

"But much more can be done," Ban underlined. "In particular, I urge you to remedy the gap between the provision of health infrastructure and the quality of service. Address inequities in accessing care, and ensure that funding for women's and children's health is available and smoothly disbursed throughout the country. Make commodities, drugs and supplies more readily available.

Ban also encouraged the expansion of the successful Midwives Service Scheme and deployment of community health extension workers to rural areas.

In September 2010, during a major UN development summit in New York, participants adopted the Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health, committing $40 billion in resources to a global effort to save the lives of 16 million women and children by 2015.

The strategy identifies the finance and policy changes needed, along with vital interventions to help improve health and save lives. It is expected to prevent, between 2011 and 2015, the deaths of more than 15 million children under five, as well as 33 million unwanted pregnancies and the deaths of 740,000 women from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth.

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