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Mothers Unite to Save Lives in Angola
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Drive six hours from Angola’s capital, Luanda, and at the end of the road you’ll reach Mucaba Municipality in Uige Province. Here, you’ll find little to no infrastructure. A major bridge damaged during Angola’s 27-year civil war was never rebuilt. Far worse, there are few trained health workers or clinical facilities, though the area is suffering from appalling rates of child mortality.
But in this remote area you will find this: the Anglican Diocese of Angola. The largest denomination in Mucaba, the Church has 20 parishes and the only real infrastructure in the municipality. It also has an active Mothers’ Union, through which women are mobilizing to save the lives of their children and grandchildren. That is why the church is optimally suited to effectively implement an integrated program for child survival spearheaded by Episcopal Relief & Development.
This initiative is urgently needed because one of every four Angolan children dies before reaching five years of age. In Africa, only Sierra Leone has a higher child mortality rate. Three in five child deaths are due to malaria, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases. Maternal mortality is also dismal, with 17 women dying for every 1,000 live births. One reason is that less than 2 percent of all births are attended by a skilled health worker.
In recent years, the Church and its Mothers’ Union have been enthusiastic participants in NetsforLife®, distributing more than 73,000 nets and training 605 health activists in Macuba and four other districts in Uige Province. But too often, their joy in reducing malaria deaths has turned to grief as children succumb to other preventable diseases. They are eager to take the tools gained through their training and deploy them in a scaled-up campaign to address all the causes of child mortality.
That is exactly what Episcopal Relief & Development is empowering them to do.
The first area of action is to ensure the safe delivery of babies by training birth attendants to provide hygienic conditions and needed medication. Volunteers are also being mobilized to promote breastfeeding, treat infections with antibiotics, and provide nutritional supplements (a two-cent Vitamin A capsule given two to three times a year can prevent blindness and death).
In addition, a program of extended immunizations is being implemented, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, to put children beyond the reach of common, but deadly diseases such as measles, polio, diphtheria and tuberculosis.
Another action item is the training of volunteers to help parents recognize the symptoms of the most common life-threatening childhood illnesses, provide needed medicines, and make referrals to health facilities when necessary. This is being accompanied by community education to raise awareness and change behaviors in hygiene, sanitation and nutrition.
The goal — to cut child and maternal mortality in half — will not be easy to reach. But with the support of Episcopal Relief & Development, the infrastructure and leadership of the Anglican Diocese of Angola and the energy, enthusiasm and dedication of the Mothers’ Union, young lives will be saved!
