Saving Moms and Babies in Malawi
FEW was delighted to welcome Dr. Jane Namasasu, a reproductive and sexual health expert from Malawi, to share her extensive experience in the field with us for our Monthly Meeting on Thursday, June 20, 2019.
Dr. Namasasu started her career as a nurse in 1975, and later studied to become a midwife, as in the public health centers nurses needed to deliver babies due to the lack of doctors available.
“I wanted to become a lawyer or a doctor, but my father said that those were jobs for men, and that nursing is more fitting for women,” Namasasu recalls the reasons of her career choice.
Despite the not-so-encouraging start of her career, she advanced from a rural health center nurse and midwife to work on the regional level of public health planning, convincing the officials that sexual and reproductive health units are needed in the whole country, which was battling with high mortality rates of both pregnant women and infants, as well as rising rates of STIs such as HIV/AIDS.
To bring those numbers down, we needed to provide families more information about family planning, and help them make more conscious decisions about their future, as well as educate the health personnel especially in the rural areas on safe procedures.
Dr. Jane Namasasu
Battling with the Bureaucracy
Namasasu’s hard work started to bear fruit in 1993, when the National Family Health Program was established by the Ministry of Health, and she was appointed the person responsible of Family Planning. She coordinated policies, strategy, and guidelines of reproductive health in the country, working closely with the local level to ensure the policies were actually put in place.
Especially health centers in the rural areas were lacking basic equipment, and the personnel was not used to reporting, so to collecting data on the numbers of maternal deaths and the reasons behind them proved to be challenging. We needed to go there and show people how to fill in the forms the government had provided.
Dr. Jane Namasasu
Battling with the bureaucracy on the policies needed to improve the health conditions of women and children was not easy though, and in 2006 Namasasu moved to Australia to do her Ph.D. on the topic. “I needed a break from all that work on the field,” she recalls laughing.
After receiving her Ph.D., now Dr. Namasasu returned to Malawi and continued her work on the national level until 2016 when she retired. She is still actively researching and writing papers for journals. Thanks to her extensive work on the field, Malawi’s mother and infant mortality rates have dropped significantly, and HIV is not spreading as rapidly as it used to.
“There is still a lot to do though, transportation and lack of equipment are still a problem. The bureaucracy of the issues makes it hard to change anything quickly, but the younger generations attitudes towards gender roles and family have been changing. I will keep working on the matter as long as I live to make our country a better place for my daughters,” Namasasu said.
FEW Japan sincerely thanks Dr. Jane Namasasu for her informative and inspiring presentation, as well as all our members for wonderful questions and the lively discussion after the presentation.