Afghanistan Country Brief: Scaling up community midwifery education for maternal and newborn health

In Afghanistan, roughly 6,400 women die each year from pregnancy-related complications, with more than one-third of deaths resulting from severe bleeding during or shortly after delivery. An estimated 25% of maternal deaths could be prevented with appropriate care during labor and delivery provided by a skilled midwife. For women living in remote and rural areas in Afghanistan, there is a chronic and severe shortage of midwives. In 2003, the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) recommended that skilled attendance at birth by midwives be scaled-up in order to be available to all women.

As a result of the recommendation, a Community Midwifery Education (CME) program was funded by USAID in 2004 to expand the number of skilled midwives in Afghanistan. Save the Children (SC), became a sub-recipient in the program and joined in collaboration with the Health Services Support Project (HSSP) to jointly manage the Community Midwifery Education (CME) training program in Jawzjan province from 2006-2012. During the eight year project, the Jawzjan program trained 138 Community Midwives, with 95% of the graduates returning to their remote communities to provide maternal and newborn care in their local health facilities. In 2011, with funding from AusAID, SC established a new CME school in Uruzgan province with the goal of training 50 midwives over a period of four years. The first cohort of 28 students from Uruzgan will graduate in July 2014.

Read the full brief to learn more about community midwifery education in Afghanistan.