Improving Darfur’s Maternal Healthcare

While the midwife situation in Darfur might be improving on the whole, in rural areas and in camps for internally displaced people, many babies are still delivered at home with the assistance of attendants who rely on traditional practices.

By Sharon Lukunka

Farha Sabil, age 35, is among several young women attending the midwives course at El Fasher Women’s Hospital in North Darfur. She came from Hashaba village, located some 70 kilometres northwest of El Fasher, to learn how to provide better care for women giving birth in her home village.

Previously, Ms. Sabil, like many birth attendants in Darfur, had relied on traditional techniques passed down through generations of women living in the region. While those techniques have served her well, has run into complications that were beyond her capabilities, forcing her to travel by donkey to the nearest village to seek more qualified assistance.

Ms. Hassanat El Nour, who is the Head of Reproductive Health at the North Darfur State Ministry of Health in El Fasher, says she has been working in the Ministry for more than nine years, trying to implement programmes specifically designed to expand the skillsets of women like Ms. Sabil. Ms. El Nour explains that, as a result of such programmes, the number of trained midwives and maternal healthcare services has doubled in Darfur’s villages in the past few years alone.

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Read the full story in the September issue of Voices of Darfur. Download the magazine (PDF) here.

On 19 September 2012, during a training session for midwives, Ms. Hawa Mohmed and Ms. Hanan Ibrahim show the class the pressure that pregnancy has on the bone structure of the pelvis. Ms. Mohmed and Ms. Hanan work in El Fasher, North Darfur, as instructors at the Midwife Centre, which trains women in modern childbirth methods. Photo by Sojoud Elgarrai, UNAMID.