Maternal Mortality During Developing Countries

At least half of all stillbirths occurred in the intrapartum period. Among the 133 million babies born alive each year, 2.8 million die in the first week of life. The patterns of these deaths are similar to the patterns for maternal deaths; the majority occurring in developing countries. Quality skilled care during pregnancy and childbirth are key for the health of the baby and the mother. In the regions with the highest neonatal mortality rates, access to postnatal care is abysmally low. In the majority of countries with data in sub-Saharan African and South Asia, fewer than half of mothers and babies receive a postnatal health check.

Maternal mortality represents more than the loss of lives for individual women, as it also reflects the larger value and prioritization of women 's health and threatens the health and survival of families, young children, and even the communities in which they live (Royston and Armstrong, 1989). Maternal mortality is unacceptably high (WHO, 2015b). Globally, approximately 830 women die every day from pregnancy- or childbirth-related complications (ibid.). The causes of maternal mortality are predominately preventable and can be classified into three fundamental causes: (1) medical - consisting of direct medical problems and pre-existent/coexistent medical problems that are aggravated by pregnancy, (2) underlying - social and legal conditions, and (3) health systems laws and policies that address availability, accessibility, and quality of reproductive health services (PHP et al, 2011).

The fifth goal is to increase maternal health in countries with a focus on reducing the maternal mortality rate by three-fourths and universal access to reproductive health both by 2015. Despite a 43% reduction in maternal deaths since 1990, there are still a large number of women who die during childbirth from preventable causes such as hemorrhaging (United Nations, 2015, p. 38).

From this, it is estimated that a nearly 30 million Mexican civilians receive benefits from the CCT program. This also includes food subsidies by other CCT programs in the region. The conditions for this program require that eligible families must be living below the worldwide poverty line and have children under the age of 23 attending school. The recipients are mostly mothers and tend to receive their grants bimonthly. There is also the involvement that the students receive educational grants from primary school through high-school. Specific to the Oportunidades program, cash grants increase with age. The data analysis for providing Mexico’s CCT program also include that girls receive higher amounts of cash grants. Other applicable conditions require attendance at preventative health care facilities in order to receive food subsidies and nutritional baby foods as extensions of the Oportunidades grant. With the successful Mexican experience, other Latin American countries began to develop their own CCT programmes. Columbia followed the Progresa model very closely; whose Families in Action program portions Progresa’s goals of human capital expansion and poverty alleviation. The creation of this program has been shown to increase families’ basic consumption by more than 15%. Other program achievements include reducing child malnutrition and child

Tessema, Gizachew Assefa, et al. "Factors Determining Quality of Care in Family Planning Services in Africa: A Systematic Review of Mixed Evidence." Plos ONE, vol. 11, no. 11, 03 Nov. 2016, pp. 1-23. EBSCOhost,

Many woman and girls in Chad are not attended to during their pregnancy, with about 23.7% of woman being attended to by skilled doctors. The reason their is such a limitation on accessing health care for woman and girls is because of poverty. Thier are so many people who live below the poverty line, approximately 80% of Chadians do. Due to this high number of people below the poverty line their is no access or a limited access to health care for woman. This high rate of poverty in Chad causes a chain reaction affecting contraceptive prelevance as well as education. Chad has a low percentage of literacy, about 31.8%, and girls in Chad have a very low enrollment in secondary school. There are large gender inequality for example per school compilation rates for girls are estimated at 25%. This lack of education is very serious which has large consequences such as high maternal mortality rate. But education is not the only serious aspect to this predicament but as well as early marriages, with marriages being arranged at early as 11 or 12. This problem is a very dangerous and serious threat to woman and girls in Chad, as well as to the whole

We report an experiment in 3,000 villages that tested whether incentives improve aid efficacy. Villages received block grants for maternal and child health and education that incorporated relative performance incentives. Subdistricts were randomized into incentives, an otherwise identical program without incentives, or control. Incentives initially improved preventative health indicators, particularly in underdeveloped areas, and spending efficiency increased. While school enrollments improved overall, incentives had no differential impact on education, and incentive health effects diminished over time. Reductions in neonatal mortality in nonincentivized areas did not persist with incentives. We find no systematic scoring manipulation nor funding

Globally the World Health Organization is tackling infant mortality through social determinants collaborated in the article, Impact of Non-Health Policies on Infant Mortality Through the Social Determinants Pathway. In this article studies performed in India indicate that poverty and income are associated to their infant mortality rates. What India has done is employed the government's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to target “ unemployment and underemployment, and therefore poverty, by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed paid employment every year to households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work” (Nair, 2011). This program is designed to have a domino effect on the economy by income, structural, and behavioral elements such as “better housing and living conditions, food security, access to clean water and proper sanitation, access to health care, infant care and feeding practices that influence the proximal risk factors of infant mortality – malnutrition, diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections”(Nair, 2011). Evidence of this program on the effects of infant mortality are premature and not calculate yet, however India’s government is confident that it will achieve its intended target of reducing infant

In 2013, 289 000 women died during pregnancy and childbirth and it was estimated that everyday 800 women all over the world died from childbirth or childbirth-related problems (World Health Organization, 2014). Often, maternal mortality is found to occur more often in developing countries than developed countries. Maternal mortality refers women who died from the situation like during pregnancy, termination of pregnancy within 42 days, regardless of duration and place of pregnancy, from aggravation caused by the pregnancy or pregnancy management (Nwagha et al, 2010). Maternal mortality may be resulted from direct or indirect cause. Direct causes are from obstetric complications of pregnancy, labour, and puerperium, and interventions whereas indirect causes are from the worsening of current conditions by pregnancy or delivery (Givewell, 2009). This paper aims to examine the causes for maternal mortality in both developed and developing countries and will end with a proposal for government to ensure women are given reproductive health rights.

The cash component itself it is very important regarding the CCT’s outcome on children especially the ones living in extreme poverty. First of all the additional cash to the family allows the household to have better purchasing power and therefore, gives the family the ability to buy medicines, better quality food, spend more money on school and health materials. By meeting the basic needs for human survival there is a reduced likelihood that a child will be exposed to infection or malnutrition. The Cash transfers also provide cognitive stimulation to the

The majority of the women in this world will give birth to a child a least once in their life. We expect that whatever hospital or provider we go to will treat us with the best care they can no matter what the circumstance. This is not true for all parts of the world though. The article “To Open Oneself Is a Poor Woman’s Trouble: Embodied Inequality and Childbirth in South–Central Tanzania” indicated different stories of the process of childbirth for several women in South-Central Tanzania. Spangler performed this research to determine the difference in childbirth health care providers and the cost element of childbirth. The research Spangler did involved several different woman: Asha, Sakina, Zamda, and Tausi. Spangler used participant

Childbirth is oftentimes described as “the miracle of life”. It is typically a time of immense pride and joy; many claim the birth of their offspring was the best day of their lives. Unfortunately, however, this exuberant experience is not a memory to be fond of for hundreds of thousands of women in developing countries. Liberia is a prime example of how grim the reality truly is. According to Yulia Widiati from Unicef, “Liberias maternal mortality ratio is one of the highest in the world, with 1,072 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births” (ADD CITATION). This doesn't even include the hundreds of infant deaths that take place every year as well, just the mothers. These numbers are excessively high when considering how far modern medicine and science has come.

and Duflo found no effect on the welfare of boys. However as the pension was an income transfer of significant proportions it is not unexpected that the health of children would increase, especially in previously highly financially constrained family’s. Nevertheless this is an important proponent in the argument for the impact that cash transfers can have on children 's health in developing nations. The most resounding finding of Duflo’s paper however was that the cash transfer had no improving effects on child health if it was received by a man, rejecting the unitary model of the household and proposing questions for the future of income transfers. These findings are refuted by findings in the develop world, Mayer found that cash transfers in the US had no effect on child welfare. Duflo highlights ‘that the efficiency consequences of transfer programs may be of different order of magnitude depending on how they are administered.’

World Health Organizations (WHO) estimate reflects the difficulty in calculating and characterizing the profile of maternal mortality in Africa. This difficulty is attributed to the incomplete vital registries, to the under-notification of causes of maternal death and to the dispersion of the cases over the wide geographical area involved. So this difficulty of investigating deaths of mother with underlined causes of death will lead us to the concept of near miss or severe maternal morbidities. The practical implementation of maternal near miss concept should provide an important contribution to improving quality of obstetric care to reduce maternal deaths and improve maternal health (3, 4).

Lagos —  Dr. Femi Akinwumi, of the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Looks At the Intimidating Challenges Facing the Health Care Sector in Nigeria And Offers Solutions...