The international day of midwives will be going to celebrate on May 5, and Africa is all ready to celebrate this day.
The motive to celebrate this day is a gesture to give all the wives an ‘honour’ for their work and promote awareness about their importance in providing crucial care to mothers and their newborns.
New Parliament speaker ‘Anita Among’ also gave a speech on this in which she reminded members of Parliament to prioritize matters that affect women and the girl child.
“Since our election to office, we have made it clear that one of the issues that will be top of our agenda is addressing the matters that affect women and the girl child. Each day we are reminded about the realities that face the sector, the statistics that define our motherly mortality rate and the challenges that our midwives face in their day to day work,” read the statement.
As per the further statement, she stated, “As a country, we are blessed with a female Vice President, Speaker, Prime Minister and even all the three Ministers in the Health docket are women, we, therefore, have a golden opportunity to push the agenda of the women.”
Anita Among also tweeted for girls in which she highlighted that she is aware of how the girls and coaches of Kampala Queens FC bring a lot of joy to the entire nation and to us. Then she added, being a fellow woman and one who cherishes giving a girl child as much as the boy child, I recognize your efforts and encourage you to even work harder.
https://twitter.com/AnitahAmong/status/1520718220470140928
According to Sarah Opendi, chairperson of the Uganda Women’s Parliamentary Association, the country is facing a shortage of midwives in the health sector and more than half of them overwork where some work for 24 hours a day.
“As government constructs health centre cells, which make sure that the midwives are trained but also we expect that the ministry of health will be able to examine the structure of the health facilities. As we know that the population is growing and therefore more mothers are delivering in the medical facilities, especially in the lower health facilities, we also check the digits of the midwives that are working in every medical facility, she stated.
Furthermore, she stated that if you go into these healthy cells, you will observe that there is a shortage of delivering beds, no power, infrastructure and most prominent, a lack of power supplies for them to use. Sometimes doctors have no gloves; they really need help with their supplies, she said.