Christina in Burkina... IN TOGO!: March 2009

16 March 2009

Things that make you go hmm

The other day I stopped by the maternité or in other words the place where women go to have babies. Five women had given birth on this day and four were already resting. The room where women rest after childbirth has five mattresses and three bed frames. The extra two mattresses go on the floor and don't have mosquito nets, unfortunately. The extra floor space in this room quickly gets filled with sitting mats brought by women relatives who sit around with the new mothers for the duration of their stay.

This facility serves the whole of Béléhédé plus its satellite villages, and lets stay that should be about 4000 people. However, the families who live 8, 10 and 15k away generally don't send women to the maternité to give birth. So, at any given time there is at least one new mother, one new baby, and three female relatives in this room. More often, there are five new mothers, five new babies and fifteen female relatives in this "resting" room. Recently the midwife helped deliver ten babies in one day/night with 10 different mothers.

Additionally, visitors are more than welcome. When I visit the new mothers, for example, I am encouraged to touch and/ or hold all the new babies. Obviously there are no incubators here. There are no mouth covers or doctor scrubs either. Out back, women cook over a wood fire to feed the new mothers and the diet consists of millet toh with sauce, as usual, and corn or millet flour porridge.

I walked out this on this particular day after politely declining to touch the newborns. I saw the fifth women who had just given birth (on the way) sitting on the floor waiting for the midwife to finish up with the baby. The midwife unceremoniously invited me into the room along with my friend Poitiba while she was at work. I was inches away as she tied the umbilical cord into a knot and snipped. The women laughed at me, she has never seen this before? Ha, look at her face!

When the new mother got up there was blood on the concrete floor outside the room where she had been sitting. The midwife passed off the baby to the relative. We left the mother and the midwife alone to do their post-birth exam. We saw that a rooster had sauntered into the waiting area and was heading straight for the resting room. He had relieved himself on the floor at the entrance to the clinic. No more than one or two minutes had passed when I saw the new mother leaving the midwife to go take her place on a mat just as the rooster wandered in towards the new mothers, new babies and all the lady relatives. Meanwhile Poitiba swept the rooster crap across the entrance-way and out the door.

Nobody but me seemed to mind the rooster.

Facts & Figures on Girls' Ed

Out-of-school children

• There are 115 million children out of school – the majority of them, 62 million, are girls – and 77 million children not enrolled in school. The difference represents the millions of children who are enrolling in but not attending school.

• Children from the poorest household are three times less likely to be in school than their counterparts in the richest households.

Gender parity

• There are now 94 girls in primary school for every 100 boys, up from 92 in 1999.

• Of the 181 countries with 2004 data available, two thirds have achieved gender parity in primary education.

• The gender gap remains particularly large in Afghanistan (44 girls in school for every 100 boys), the Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Pakistan and Yemen.

Illiteracy

• There are 781 million illiterate adults, two thirds of them women, worldwide.

Early childhood

• Children whose mothers have no education are more than twice as likely to be out of school as children whose mothers have some education

• In developing countries, 75 per cent of the children not in primary school have uneducated mothers

• One additional year of schooling for 1,000 women helps prevent two maternal deaths.

• Early childhood care and education establishes a solid foundation for learning and makes both girls and boys ready to attend school at the right age. It also improves parents’ and caregivers’ readiness to send their children to school by equipping them with deeper knowledge and skills.

• More girls can attend and complete school if other children they need to care for are receiving early childhood care and education; this is particularly crucial for children affected by HIV and AIDS.

HIV and AIDS

• If all children received a complete primary education, around 700,000 cases of HIV in young adults could be prevented each year.

• Women represent 62 per cent of the 15- to 24-year-olds living with HIV and AIDS globally

• The burden of AIDS care falls especially heavily on women, and can limit educational and economic opportunities for women and girls.

• Higher education levels for girls are associated with a reduced risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

• 15.2 million children under age 18 have lost one or both parents to AIDS; 12 million of these children live in sub- Saharan Africa.

Violence

• Girls between 13 and 18 years old constitute the largest group exploited in the commercial sex industry. It is estimated that around 500,000 girls below 18 are victims

of trafficking each year.

• Female genital mutilation/cutting affects 130 million girls and women globally and places 2 million at risk annually.

• In some cultures, the preference for boy children results in prenatal sex selection and infanticide of girls. In India, there are 933 Indian women for every 1,000 men,

reflecting 40 million ‘missing’ women.

Emergencies

• More than 80 per cent of the world’s 35 million refugees and displaced people are women and children.

• Emergencies put women at risk of extreme sexual violence and abuse. In Rwanda, 2,000 women, many of whom were survivors of rape, tested positive for HIV during the five years following the 1994 genocide.

In addition to its benefits for girls and women, education is a uniquely positive force with a wide-ranging impact on society and human development. Educated girls can better protect themselves against HIV, trafficking and abuse, and are more likely to grow up to have healthier families and send their children to school.

From United Nations Girls' Education Initiative