Text messages save pregnant Rwandan women

A man scrolls through his mobile phone to carry out a money transaction in Nairobi May 12, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Noor Khamis

(Reuters) – At midnight Valentine Uwingabire’s back began to hurt. Her husband ran to tell Germaine Uwera, a community health worker in their village in the fertile foothills of Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park.

Equipped with a mobile phone from the local health center, Uwera sent an urgent SMS text message and within a quarter of an hour, an ambulance had whisked Valentine to hospital. Minutes later Uwingabire’s third child was born.

“We called our child Manirakoze, which means ‘Thank God’,” she told reporters, sitting outside her mud and bamboo house pitched in the shadow of Karisimbi volcano, home to some of the world’s few remaining highland mountain gorillas.

Had it not been for Rwanda’s new Rapid SMS service, Valentine would have been carried in agony, down the hill to the nearest town on an improvised stretcher.

As is the case in much of Africa, fixed-line telephone networks are virtually non-existent outside of the capital and major cities.

The Rapid SMS scheme — a joint initiative between three U.N. organizations — is being tested in the Musanze District where 432 health workers have received mobile phones.

Health workers register pregnant women in their village via free SMS text messages and send regular updates to a central server in the capital, Kigali. They are monitored during the pregnancy, and those at high risk brought in for check-ups.

Rwanda, Africa’s most densely populated nation, is ranked among the world’s worst for maternal mortality, according to U.N. data, and it is an important target for the global body’s goal to reduce maternal deaths by 75 percent globally by 2015.

“NO MATERNAL DEATHS”

John Kalach, director of the nearest hospital in Ruhengeri, says since Rapid SMS launched in August 2009, his hospital has had no maternal deaths, compared to 10 the previous year.

“We used to get ladies coming here with serious complications just because they delayed the decision because the journey was very long,” he says.

Kalach says authorities can use the data to work out which diseases affect women during pregnancy, the causes of death for children below five years, the volume and type of drugs required, and to monitor population growth rates.

Friday Nwaigwe, UNICEF’s country head of child health and nutrition, says the next step is to give mobile phones to 17,500 maternal health workers across the country and eventually to all 50,000 community health workers.

“In Rwanda we have 750 out of every 100,000 pregnant women die every year. It’s a very big problem,” Nwaigwe says.

Still, in a nation where only six percent of its 10 million-strong population has access to electricity, a country-wide expansion of the scheme may run into problems.

Germaine says to charge her phone she has to walk 20 minutes to the nearest charging booth, and Kalach says some remote areas of the hilly country do not yet have network coverage.

But surrounded by trees heaving with chandeliers of green bananas and fields bursting with beans, Uwera and Uwingabire agree a simple text message has had a big impact on their lives.

“We used to use a traditional ambulance made of mats, like a stretcher made of papyrus and sticks. It takes one hour by walking — or five minutes in a car,” Germaine says, cradling baby Manirakoze and proudly brandishing her mobile telephone.

Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64R2CL20100528?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

Courtesy
Thomson Reuters

Text messages save pregnant Rwandan women

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A man scrolls through his mobile phone to carry out a money transaction in Nairobi May 12, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Noor Khamis

(Reuters) – At midnight Valentine Uwingabire’s back began to hurt. Her husband ran to tell Germaine Uwera, a community health worker in their village in the fertile foothills of Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park.

Equipped with a mobile phone from the local health center, Uwera sent an urgent SMS text message and within a quarter of an hour, an ambulance had whisked Valentine to hospital. Minutes later Uwingabire’s third child was born.

“We called our child Manirakoze, which means ‘Thank God’,” she told reporters, sitting outside her mud and bamboo house pitched in the shadow of Karisimbi volcano, home to some of the world’s few remaining highland mountain gorillas.

Had it not been for Rwanda’s new Rapid SMS service, Valentine would have been carried in agony, down the hill to the nearest town on an improvised stretcher.

As is the case in much of Africa, fixed-line telephone networks are virtually non-existent outside of the capital and major cities.

The Rapid SMS scheme — a joint initiative between three U.N. organizations — is being tested in the Musanze District where 432 health workers have received mobile phones.

Health workers register pregnant women in their village via free SMS text messages and send regular updates to a central server in the capital, Kigali. They are monitored during the pregnancy, and those at high risk brought in for check-ups.

Rwanda, Africa’s most densely populated nation, is ranked among the world’s worst for maternal mortality, according to U.N. data, and it is an important target for the global body’s goal to reduce maternal deaths by 75 percent globally by 2015.

“NO MATERNAL DEATHS”

John Kalach, director of the nearest hospital in Ruhengeri, says since Rapid SMS launched in August 2009, his hospital has had no maternal deaths, compared to 10 the previous year.

“We used to get ladies coming here with serious complications just because they delayed the decision because the journey was very long,” he says.

Kalach says authorities can use the data to work out which diseases affect women during pregnancy, the causes of death for children below five years, the volume and type of drugs required, and to monitor population growth rates.

Friday Nwaigwe, UNICEF’s country head of child health and nutrition, says the next step is to give mobile phones to 17,500 maternal health workers across the country and eventually to all 50,000 community health workers.

“In Rwanda we have 750 out of every 100,000 pregnant women die every year. It’s a very big problem,” Nwaigwe says.

Still, in a nation where only six percent of its 10 million-strong population has access to electricity, a country-wide expansion of the scheme may run into problems.

Germaine says to charge her phone she has to walk 20 minutes to the nearest charging booth, and Kalach says some remote areas of the hilly country do not yet have network coverage.

But surrounded by trees heaving with chandeliers of green bananas and fields bursting with beans, Uwera and Uwingabire agree a simple text message has had a big impact on their lives.

“We used to use a traditional ambulance made of mats, like a stretcher made of papyrus and sticks. It takes one hour by walking — or five minutes in a car,” Germaine says, cradling baby Manirakoze and proudly brandishing her mobile telephone.

(Editing by Jeremy Clarke and Michael Roddy)

Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64R2CL20100528?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

Courtesy
Thomson Reuters

What is the true price of Rwanda's recovery?

In the middle of Lake Kivu, on Rwanda’s western border, is a shining example of how Rwanda is changing – a pioneering methane extraction plant providing much-needed power for the fast-growing economy.

Killer’s admission of 700 murders illustrates the scale of divisions to overcome

The plant – entirely developed and funded by the Rwandan government – is testimony to the country’s remarkable recovery from the horrors of the 1994 genocide.

Since the genocide, in which some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed, Rwanda’s efficient, imaginative and relatively incorrupt government has acquired many admirers in the West.

They are impressed by its efforts to play down differences between Hutu and Tutsi, to encourage outside investors and to plough money into development, with the ambitious aim of building the silicon valley of Central Africa.

Some, however, say the economic growth has come at a high cost in terms of human rights.

Western backing

A powerful network of US corporate bosses have acted as cheerleaders for Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame:

“Rwanda has gone from literally the bottom of the heap to become the beacon for Africa in 15 years,” says Joe Ritchie, a Chicago financier, now one of Mr Kagame’s senior advisers.

Equally impressed is the British government, Rwanda’s biggest bilateral donor, which gives the country about £50m ($75m) a year in aid, most of which goes straight into central government coffers.

The genocide has become a kind of blackmail to be used against everyone. After 16 years it is high time for democracy Opposition politician Victoire Ingabire

“There is a dynamism and a focus in the Rwandan leadership,” says British High Commissioner Nick Cannon. “I think that comes from the emergence of the current government from the experience of the genocide.”

But a growing band of critics disagrees.

“There’s practically no freedom of expression, the political space for any kind of opposition is extremely limited, and anyone who tries to criticise or challenge the government is subject to intimidation or threats or worse,” says Carina Tertsakian from Human Rights Watch.

“We have a situation where British money is serving to prop up a government that is routinely violating the rights of its citizens. I simply don’t think that the genocide and the events that surrounded it can be used as an excuse to suppress criticism and dissent.”

Anti-ideology law

Rwanda’s Tutsi-dominated government, the force that ended the genocide in 1994, fiercely rejects such claims.

“I think there is this myth or created idea that Rwanda is doing well but you can’t express yourself,” says Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo. “It’s totally wrong.”

Ms Tertsakian and other rights critics cite a law that bans the spreading of “genocide ideology”.

Visiting a state-run education camp for young Rwandans

Aimed in theory at preventing the kind of racial hate-speak that fuelled the genocide, they say it is used in practice to suppress any criticism the government dislikes.

Rwanda’s most prominent human rights groups, Liprodhor, says that the law has restricted its activities and sent half of its staff into exile:

“Everyone feared being persecuted, they could be imprisoned,” activist Gertrude Nyampinga says.

The genocide ideology charge has also been used against one of the most controversial figures in Rwanda today, opposition politician Victoire Ingabire.

Recently returned after years in exile, she hopes to stand against Mr Kagame in August’s elections, but she has not yet been allowed to register her party and has no access to the state-run media.

The government accuses her of inflammatory language, and the police have called her in several times for questioning – most recently last week.

Solidarity message

Ms Ingabire says the country is effectively a one-party state where a climate of fear prevents Hutus and Tutsis discussing their differences.

“The genocide has become a kind of blackmail to be used against everyone. After 16 years it is high time for democracy – not to continue to brandish the genocide to avoid a democratic process,” Ms Ingabire said.

I would not mind being forced to live peacefully with my neighbour, because the alternative is to be free to kill my neighbour Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo

A cornerstone of the government’s policy of reconciliation is the system of education camps, or ingando, where students and other young people attend courses in military training and Rwandan history.

The message there is that Hutu and Tutsi are artificial categories exaggerated by Rwanda’s former colonial masters, which should now be forgotten.

“We’re no longer Hutus or Tutsis, we are Rwandan, we are one. The elder are already destroyed… But from us we have hope for the future, for a better Rwanda,” business student Jacques Rubayiza told us when we visited one camp.

Everyone we spoke to at the camp expressed the same zeal and the same point of view – without dissent.

But even prominent Tutsi exiles, such as Joseph Sebarenzi, believe that artificially suppressing differences rather than airing them could result in violence erupting again one day.

UK aid role

Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo dismisses such notions saying: “I would not mind being forced to live peacefully with my neighbour, because the alternative is to be free to kill my neighbour.”

As for Britain’s role in supporting Rwanda, Mr Cannon says: “Although there are aspects of the country’s human rights that are not perfect – certainly we wouldn’t be here or doing what we’re doing if we didn’t think there was a commitment on the part of the government to the values we share.”

He points in particular to a shared commitment to pro-poor policies – thanks in part to British aid, the proportion of poor Rwandans fell from 70% of the population to 57% between 1994 and 2006.

School attendance has risen dramatically, maternal mortality has fallen.

“Where our money goes,” he says, “is into improving the daily lives of the people of this country. There’s no real scope for the diversion of that money into other purposes.”

Reference Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8593734.stm

Courtesy
BBC News