Over time, there has been some progress in the health sector in Tanzania; however, rural communities continue to lag behind urban communities in terms of maternal, newborn, and child health care. There was a 47% reduction of MMR between 1990 and 2012—870 to 232 deaths per 100,000 live births—but Tanzania did not make sufficient progress to attain its MDG of reducing MMR to 193 per 100,000 live births.
There is a comprehensive infrastructure of health care delivery in Tanzania but it is faced with enormous challenges in the operation field. Healthcare facilities in rural areas are generally less functional due to staff absenteeism, poor health provider skills, and inadequate basic supplies and equipment. Lack of good governance, allocation of insufficient resources, limited capacity of health managers, vertical programs with minimal integration, and suboptimal monitoring and supervision are some of the key underlying factors of the lack of performance.
The project named Safe Delivery Kills Mortality or Maternal Delivery Kit Project (MDKP) tailored and engineered by PANETA in 2019 has aimed to allocate its resources to improve the coverage and quality of basic supplies and equipment of maternal delivery kits in rural communities of Tanzania and the provisions of antenatal and postnatal educations hand in hand with the training of the Traditional Birth Attendants.
Specific Objectives of the Safe Delivery Kills Mortality’s have been:
-To provide information to women, men and communities on the importance of delivering in a clean environment.
-To build capacity amongst community leaders to be able to mobilize on clean and safe delivery.
-To improve maternity health care by reducing the maternal and neonatal mortality rate.
-To reduce risk factors that lead to labour and delivery complications.
-To create a conducive environment for safe delivery.
-To improve access and availability of maternal delivery kits to communities in the project area.
-To improve maternal health care behaviour and practices of communities in the target area
The project will also go hand in hand with the provisions of reproductive health education.
To rectify this mission PANETA with Rotary International, the Rotary Club of Windsor Canada and local Rotary clubs of Hai Kilimanjaro came together in Maternal VTT 2023, a project which started its preparations later in 2019 but came to life in 2023, it was delayed by several factors including strikes of coronavirus pandemic.
Collaboratively efforts between the PANETA team and the Canada team of experienced health care providers tailored this project in preparation of the teaching materials and supplies such as birth kits and pneumatics Anti-shock garments for the PPH control via a Countless number of Zoom meetings.
On the 2nd of September 2023, the Canadian team led by Andrea landed at Kilimanjaro International Airport and was welcomed by the Rotary Club of Hai and PANETA, all with smiling faces and energy ready for the project implementation.
