Family planning key to child spacing

A new roadmap to improve postpartum family planning has been presented at the International Conference on Family planning this week in Ethiopia.
Postpartum family planning focuses on providing different kinds of contraceptives for women after childbirth and during the first 12 months of motherhood. The aim is to prevent another pregnancy right away, since that can have a negative health impact on both mother and child.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) operates a postpartum family planning program in 15 Asian and African countries, including Ethiopia.
Postpartum family planning needs are often overlooked, says Koki Agarwal, director of the Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program.
"If these women were not to use family planning, then they would have shortened birth intervals, which would mean higher risks of mortality for their child," Agarwal said. "So even 30 percent higher risks for children who were born when the intervals are less than three years. And also the mothers themselves cannot recover and have problems with anemia and ability to breastfeed their child, so the child does not get full nourishment."
The roadmap presented at the conference outlines a tracking system of postpartum contraceptive use, easy-to-understand information materials for families, and recommended practices for health workers.
While development agencies say postpartum family planning is of crucial importance, advocating it is not always easy.
Nurse Tigest Yigezu works for one of the 16 health centers in Ethiopia that have implemented the postpartum family planning program. She makes daily house visits to mothers who have just given birth, and tries to convince families to use contraceptives.
Yigezu says there are no problems convincing families of the short-term family planning contraceptive but that male partners often refuse long-term use. She says it is mostly a cultural and religious issue, as children are seen as a blessing for the family.
Research shows 95 percent of postpartum women around the world want to avoid another pregnancy for at least two years, yet 65 percent do not use contraception.
In Ethiopia, only 19 percent of women with newborn babies use contraceptives. Shashemene Hospital started postpartum family planning advocacy and free distribution of contraceptives last year.
Director Wihid Gebrehiwot says his hospital has helped just 245 women, due to capacity limitations.
"The hospital cannot have all this family planning services," he said. "Even the government cannot provide such amount of free postpartum family planning methods, especially the long-term family planning services. And if you do not have the materials and logistics at hand you can not do anything."
Gebrehiwot says it is unclear how the free distribution of contraceptives can continue, if the Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program stops providing funding.
Ethiopia has met the Millennium Development Goal target on child survival by reducing its under-five mortality rate by 67 percent in the past two decades. More focus on postpartum family planning could further reduce the number of child deaths.

Katete’s Undi Primary School still has ‘colonial face’

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By DOREEN NAWA
UNDI Primary School is one of the oldest schools in the country where formal education was first introduced by missionaries and colonialists.
But it is now an eyesore. Built in 1952, the school has not received a facelift since then.
Located four kilometres from the Great East Road and less than a kilometre from Kalonga Gawa Undi’s palace, the school has poor infrastructure which has affected the performance of the pupils.
“We are not very far away from town [Katete] but if you look at the school infrastructure, one may mistake us for a refugee camp in some border area,” says acting school headmaster, Christopher Moyo.
Mr Moyo has one appeal to politicians, and that is to ensure that they honour their promises.
“Politicians have come and gone and nothing has been done to this school. This school is less than 100 metres away from the road leading to Kalonga Gawa Undi’s palace. Politicians come here every year for the ceremony without passing by to see how dilapidated the school infrastructure is,” he said.
“I hope our new member of Parliament (MP), Peter Phiri will ensure that our school receives attention. I know he may not personally do it, but he can bring out the challenges that schools in Mkaika constituency face in Parliament.
By so doing, Government through the Ministry of Education can come to our rescue,” Mr Moyo said.
The school is situated about a kilometre away from the palace and is by the roadside leading to Paramount Kalonga Gawa Undi’s palace. It has grades 1 to 9.
A visit to this school confirms its desperate need for a facelift. The school is home to 631 pupils who depend on six classrooms.
“Our school has no infrastructure to talk about and this has also affected the performance of the pupils. The lack of infrastructure is certainly a crisis,” Mr Moyo said. It is a reality that most rural pupils are disadvantaged in their education because they lack certain learning materials and better school infrastructure.
For Undi Primary School, delivering quality education to the pupils in the area is a challenge because the school’s infrastructure makes it look like a blueprint for demolition.
“At this school, talking of quality education is a fallacy because of the quality of the infrastructure. The school has only one borehole which services teachers, the pupils and the villages around this area with a population of over 1,300 people,” Mr Moyo said.
Education is seen as an equaliser of opportunities. For that to be realised, it is essential that the children have the necessary school infrastructure, equipment and materials. Children cannot compete favourably if they lack in certain materials.
Jane Phiri, a Grade 7 pupil at Undi Primary School notes that there is a crisis in education in Katete, adding that if she had a choice, she would have migrated to Lusaka to pursue her education from there.
“We are not motivated to come to school, that is why some parents opt to marrying off their girls. Sometimes as girls, we talk about our goals and we get frustrated by the infrastructure,” said Jane.

A close-up on one of the classrooms at Undi School

Ackson Jere, one of the teachers at the school says the need to invest more in infrastructure development in the education sector cannot be over-emphasised, especially now that the re-entry policy and free education policy are in place.
“Indeed, it is a tough world and all the indications are that it is going to become even tougher for most Zambians in rural areas in a few decades to come and set out to make a future of their own without an education.
If the government is committed to educating all children in Zambia, then investing in infrastructure and resources in the sector should be a priority,” Mr Jere said.
The Millennium Development Goals set a more realistic, but still difficult, deadline of 2015 for least-developed countries that are still wallowing in abject poverty.
Investing in education infrastructure remains key to achieving education for all by 2015.