Darfur, Sudan is one of the most deprived and impoverished areas in the world. The people here live lives of unimaginable hardship. At the forefront of climate change, flooding and droughts are a regular occurrence and now inflation is over 363% (Trading Economics, 2021), a result of the ongoing economic crisis. Families are struggling to feed their children and healthcare is a luxury not many people can afford, and in remote villages, it is unavailable. Rural hospitals have, at best, basic and little equipment. While living conditions have improved in other areas of the country, Darfur has been left behind.
Sudan has a Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) of 295 deaths per 100 000 pregnancies (United Nations Population Fund, 2020), higher than the global average and staggeringly larger than the seven deaths per 100 000 recorded here in the UK. However, Darfur itself has one of the highest MMR rates in the world recording 727 deaths per 100 000 pregnancies in 2013 (Reliefweb, 2014). With Darfur mainly consisting of small, interspersed villages, the nearest hospital is usually several hours away, and can only be accessed via a donkey and cart, leaving many women at risk of death during childbirth from causes that could be prevented. The reason for this high number of maternal deaths is the lack of trained and skilled midwives in rural areas who are able to detect high-risk pregnancies. The most the majority of villages can hope for is an untrained traditional birth attender as there is no other healthcare available.
Midwives during a Kids for Kids training session in Darfur, Sudan
Kids for Kids has supported children and their families in Darfur for 20 years. By providing community led sustainable projects, Kids for Kids has adopted over 106 villages and helped over 550 000 people. It quickly became apparent to our Founder, Patricia Parker MBE, that something must be done to help expectant mothers in this area get access to trained medical care. Our health projects are a priority to the charity.
Therefore, Kids for Kids funds the training of two midwives from each village, in the regional capital El Fasher. We have also built a training school to enable 40 villages midwives to be trained. Once training is complete, we provide each midwife with leather sandals, a medical kit in a secure tin box to avoid contamination by insects in the desert, a mobile phone and strong cross-bred donkey, the main mode of transport in Darfur and the only way to cross the sand of the desert to reach her patients. A solar lantern is also provided, with no electricity supply in villages deliveries usually take place by the light of a fire.
Every 14 months, Kids for Kids trains 40 midwives. These women are then a beacon of hope to expectant mothers in their villages. They are trained to diagnose high-risk pregnancies, manage difficult births but also help to educate against female genital mutilation (FGM). Although this practice is now illegal in Sudan since 2020, the idea of FGM is ingrained culturally in many villages in Darfur and our midwives are trained to identify and report any instances they may come across. Because they are from the villages in which they work, mothers trust them and it is therefore much more likely that they will not ask to be resewn, or for their daughters to submit to the practise. Additionally, and an unexpected outcome for the charity, is that trained midwives are able to register births. This is inestimably important both for the individual and authorities. During the COVID-19 pandemic when people could not travel to El Fasher to register births, the Kids for Kids' villages are unique in having births registered.
In the absence of healthcare in villages, and the danger of travel from the moment that conflict erupted in Darfur in 2003, Kids for Kids has also funded two first aid workers in each village. We also provide the drugs for a Revolving Drug Scheme in each community and train the midwives and first aid works in accountability and bookkeeping to enable them to run the scheme. They are overseen by committees we also train in each community and answer to the village as a whole at a review meeting each year.
Although there is an agreement with the State Ministry of Health to share the costs of training with Kids for Kids and to pay salaries once the midwives are trained, the Ministry has not had the funding to pay salaries for some time. Sudan is struggling with huge debts and is striving to recover from years of corruption and neglect by the previous regime. Expectant mothers therefore often pay village midwives in kind—from a chicken or a goat, to goat's milk or seeds.
Where a village has been running the Kids for Kids' projects well, they are able to request a health unit. To date, there are eight such brick-built units in our villages but many more are needed.
One of our midwives, Manal, was chosen by her village to undertake the training to become a midwife for her community. She graduated in 2018 and returned to her home village of Hashab Braka.
Manal delivered her first baby during the first week of her return. Since then, Manal delivers 4–5 babies every month in her village but her skills have been needed in the neighbouring villages where access to antenatal care is also limited. Because of her training, Manal now has the skills and confidence to identify difficult births and refers the mothers to the nearest health clinic in Mallit.
By becoming midwives, Manal and other women in Darfur are able to earn a living and are also given status in their communities. A lot of the work of Kids for Kids centres around empowering women and making sure they have a voice in their community.
To date, Kids for Kids have trained over 500 midwives, helping to deliver countless babies, and saving countless lives. Mothers are receiving proper healthcare and support, and maternal mortality rates are decreasing in the villages where we work.
While conditions improve in the villages we partner with, there are still thousands of women who still have no access to antenatal care in Darfur. As a result of the pandemic, many maternal health clinics in the towns closed across the country (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2021). We need to reach more women and we are only able to do so with the help from our supporters.