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Male health activists step in to help in Indian child births

By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
January 30th, 2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

In order to reach the United Nations' millennium development goals 4 and 5, which is to reduce child and maternal mortality respectively, such new innovations have been introduced in such remote areas as rural India, Malawi and Sierra Leone. One of these new ideas are male health activists, or MHAs to help support the existing cadre of female accredited social health Activists or ASHAs in mothering and childcare.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - "The government of India has identified an essential package of interventions that are known to save lives of mothers, infants and children," project director Patricia Dandonoli, from Concern Worldwide says. "Those interventions are simple and cost effective, but the challenges in implementing those interventions are tremendous," Dandonoli says.

In a patriarchal society, which is the norm for rural India, ASHAs face challenges in engaging with "men folk" on pregnancy and family planning issues.

For example: Odisha is one of India's least developed provinces. Almost 40 percent of its 20.7 million people are indigenous or belong to extremely marginalized Hindu castes that live in remote hamlets or inaccessible areas.
According to the state health and family welfare department, in 2011, Odisha's male-to-female sterilization ratio was a highly skewed 1:44.

"Family planning and mother and childcare advocacy have become lopsided, too mother-targeted, and not bringing desired attitudinal change because young mothers are not the decision makers," Dharitri Rout, secretary of the non-profit Women's Organization for Socio-Cultural Awareness says.

In Odisha, more than 258 women die each year for every 100,000 deliveries, while 65 infants die in every 1,000 live births, according to the latest Sample Registration System (SRS) - India's largest demographic sample survey,

"Through Innovations' unique and exciting project we reached out to the people of Odisha to understand problems better and to seek their ideas and solutions to these problems," Obert Mulhall, Concern Worldwide's country manager says.

One ASHA is identified per 1,000 rural populations to help the community through awareness building and increased utilization of existing health services, with emphasis on increasing institutional childbirths.

Security remains a very real concern for female ASHAs who are expected to be on call to attend to women in labor and move them to distant health facilities.

"While the men decide the number of children, they think they have no role to play in women's nutrition during pregnancy and lactation," Rout says.

"Now, with MHAs accompanying the ASHAs on door-to-door rounds, the husbands come out and participate in information sharing and are no longer barriers to healthcare-seeking behavior," Rout adds.

"The ASHA cadre is overburdened since the responsibility for many primary health programs converge on these grassroots health workers," observes Raj Kumar Ghosh, a senior government health official.

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

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