SAFE MOTHERHOOD DAY ESSENTIAL FOR SURVIVAL

Today, April 11, is National Safe Motherhood Day (NSMD), which is commemorated annually to raise and further spread awareness on proper health and other forms of care for safe motherhood.

This is especially about the sundry maternity facilities for both pregnant and lactating women, focusing upon such essentials as “reducing anaemia among women; ensuring proper institutional delivery (where possible); better pre- and post-natal health-care – including the provision of a good diet and medical attention for both mother and child, et cetera”.

Initiated by the United Nations Organisation (UN) in 1987, the concept of “safe motherhood” has the primary goal of “ensuring that women go through pregnancy and childbirth safely, so that they can give birth to healthy children”…

In some the UN member countries – like India, for example – the NSMD concept goes the proverbial extra mile, by also raising awareness for the need to also prevent child marriages, a situation which has been demonstrated to contribute to unsafe motherhood in all its forms.

What with one thing leading to another, and acting on the recommendations of the White Ribbon Alliance India (WRAI) – an alliance of maternal health advocates committed to reducing maternal mortality and morbidity in India – the Indian government officially declared April 11 National Safe Motherhood Day.

April 11 was the birth-date in 1869 of Kasturba Gandhi, who was married at 14 to the generally-acknowledged Father of the Indian nation, Mahatma Gandhi.

In due course of time, and for good measure, the NSMD initiative was reinforced at the international level by including in it the noble objective of reducing maternal mortality in the 2000-2015 UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The successor UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 2016-2030) aim at reducing the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births : down from 830 deaths in 2019.

Well, what else can do this much better that faithfully observing National Safe Motherhood Day, pray?

WANTED: CHANGE OF MIND-SET

Job creation and unemployment are hot issues globally, and Tanzania is no exception. Meanwhile, employers complain about poorly trained personnel. They argue that, more often than not, they have to invest a lot of money into shaping up, and bringing their employees to the desired standards.

What, then, is the cause of this mismatch? Clearly, our education system has problems. It provides the labour market with semi-skilled and barely-skilled personnel. What is even worse is that it tunes the minds of students to think of “getting an employment somewhere” rather than self-employment.

This calls for serious reforms. To start with, all those with a PhD should, by law, transform themselves into institutions capable of creating jobs. This would not only help create more decent jobs but would also encourage innovation. Production too would rise.

The role of the government is to provide an enabling environment for this transformation to take place. It must ensure that the education system is aligned with modern needs.

Families should fine-tune children’s thinking so they appreciate self-employment from a young age.