The 8 UN Millennium Development Goals (UN MDGs)
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Encourage global partnerships for development
The UN MDGs represent a global partnership that has grown from the commitments and targets established at the world summits of the 1990s. Responding to the world's main development challenges and to the calls of civil society, the MDGs promote poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases.
Set for the year 2015, the MDGs are an agreed set of goals that can be achieved if all people work together and do their part. Poor countries have pledged to govern better, and invest in their people through health care and education. Rich countries have pledged to support them, through aid, debt relief, and fairer trade
The UN Millennium Development Goals addressed by the Birthing Kit Project are:
1. Improve maternal health (MDG 5)
2. Reduce child mortality (MDG 4)
3. Promote gender equality and empower women (MDG 3)
4. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases (MDG 6)
The Birthing Kits and training programmes have a marked impact on these 4 MDGs with the impact of the Birthing Kit Project being felt long after the kits are used and the training is completed.
Improve maternal health
The BKFA clean birthing kits are targeted for home births where a large percentage of maternal mortalities occur. The supply of a clean birthing kit provides for a safe and clean birthing environment with the ability to reduce infection, which is the second most frequent cause of maternal death. Statistical evidence received indicates that the simple clean birth kits are saving many lives. From Afghanistan in 2008, it was reported that with the distribution and implementation of '2359 kits only one woman died and no babies.' Statistically speaking it would have been expected that 44-118 women would have died and over 100 babies. The impact of the kits is dramatic in reducing maternal deaths.
At the time of distributing the birthing kits the opportunity arises for the midwives to provide awareness of post partum and neonatal care, pregnancy and related risk factors and inform impending mothers about hygiene, birth plans, nutrition, breast feeding and family planning.
Reduce child mortality
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that in 2004 128,000 newborns died of Neonatal Tetanus, a disease that can be caused when the umbilical cord is cut with a non-sterile instrument such as knives, scissors and bamboo. The supply, by the BKFA, of clean birthing kits which contain a sterile scalpel blade assists in promoting a more hygienic delivery and this disease can be eliminated.
Since using the BKFA clean birthing kits one partner organisation in Afghanistan reported fewer cases of post-natal infections for mothers and no new cases of neonatal tetanus for babies being recorded.
Traditional Birth Attendants, health extension workers and village nurses are also educated, at BKFA funded health training programmes, about the importance of good hygiene and nutrition, taking that knowledge back to their local communities. As the mortality rate for babies from poor hygiene and nutrition in their first year is extremely high, this education impacts on not only individual families but the community as a whole.
Promotion of gender equality and empower women
Education through the BKFA funded training programmes is the most significant way the Birthing Kit Project empowers women. Proving particularly useful, as many attendants and village women are illiterate, are the pictorial educational booklets produced in the local language and given to each course attendant. Enabling these trained women to go back to their villages, educated and with a training manual to pass on their knowledge to other local women, provides them with a previously unknown status and empowerment. Their knowledge then benefits the entire community.
At one training seminar in Kenya, 400 Maasai Mara women were interested in training. Unfortunately the funding only extended to 80 women.
Combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
The sterilised scalpel blade within each kit and the education provided with its distribution, discourages the need for Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) to re-use unclean old knives and blades for several births. This dramatically stops cross infection and the transfer of harmful viruses like HIV to baby and mother. The TBA is also trained in the proper disposal of the scalpel blade after use.
The gloves with the birthing kits are highly valued with feedback from health professionals in Kenya, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Madagascar indicating many HIV/AIDS pregnant women getting no assistance from TBAs during childbirth, due to concerns about catching the disease. With the gloves the midwives felt safe and protected and once again were assisting HIV/AIDS infected women during childbirth.
The BKFA funded training programmes also addressed health issues relating to HIV/AIDS with the information taken back to the villages by the birth attendants.
In Kenya anecdotally it was noted that no midwives had contracted HIV/AIDS since using the birthing kits.