Maternity Foundation

Every day, 800 women die from complications in pregnancy or childbirth. Maternity Foundation works to ensure a safer childbirth for women and newborns.

The Problem

In Ethiopia, 13.000 mothers die from pregnancy or birth related complications every year, and around 100.000 babies die during delivery or first 28 days of life. 90% of these deaths could be prevented with access to skilled care during pregnancy and childbirth, but only 28% give birth at a facility - and even here, the quality of care is often note adequate to ensure survival.

The Solution

Maternity Foundation works with an integrated approach to improve the health of mothers and newborns. In the community we focus on empowering women to seek care during pregnancy, delivery and in the post-partum period, and at the health facilities, we work to improve the capacity of the health workers to proved quality skilled care. Our current project (2016 – 2019) covers 9 districts with a population of 700.000. In the projects previous phase, an external end-evaluation documented that we had reached more than 190,000 community members with health education and more than 5 million people with radio health information. In addition, 3,000 poor and hard-to reach women were empowered through livelihood strengthening activities. As a result, a 60% higher ante-natal care attendance and 30% higher skilled birth attendance was seen in intervention districts compared to neighboring districts. These are critical indicators for ensuring that mothers and newborns survive.

We need continued support to train more health workers, reach more pregnant women, mothers and newborns.

We are incredible grateful for any support given.

No Woman Should Die Giving Life.