Family Care International works with women to ensure maternal health.

In the fifth blog post in our series about the UN’s Millennium Development Goals we focus on Millennium Goal 5: Improve maternal health. The UN goal is to ensure that by 2015 there is universal access to reproductive healthcare and to reduce by three quarters the number of women dying from childbirth by 2015.

In Sub Saharan Africa about one in 150 women die in child birth which is about 40 times higher than in the developed world. Although the number of deaths in Sub Saharan Africa has declined 28 percent from 1990 to 2008, it is still below the 34 percent decline found for all developing regions.

Many women do not use contraception either because the healthcare system is poorly funded, it violates their religious beliefs, or their husbands are opposed to it. This leads to an increase in high-risk pregnancies among very young women. There is[...]

[Published in NonProfitBlogs - Read the original article]