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CWS Durable Solutions Means Lasting Health for Afghans
Dr. Shama Khalid (center) and members of her staff at the Basic Health Unit in the Khaki Refugee Camp for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
Photo: Mohammad Arshad
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Afghans have one of the world's worst health records. Conflict has displaced millions within Afghanistan and to nearby countries. Access to education and health care is limited, especially for women. Alarming numbers of women and babies die in childbirth, and many who survive die from preventable diseases.
But dramatically fewer Afghan women die in childbirth in communities served by the Church World Service Pakistan/Afghanistan Community Health Project, and their children are much more likely to survive.
More than 250,000 Afghans benefit from the project, part of the CWS Durable Solutions for Displaced Persons (DSDP) program offering services to long-term forcibly displaced people around the world.
The program serves Afghan refugees in northwestern Pakistan and internally displaced persons and returnees in eastern Afghanistan.
Results are most dramatic inside Afghanistan, where in the general population 1,900 women die in childbirth for every 100,000 live births, and 165 of every 1,000 newborns die. According to the most recent data available, those numbers drop to 860 and 28, respectively, in communities CWS serves. Similarly, the general Afghan refugee community in Pakistan suffers a maternal mortality rate of 500 per 100,000 live births and an infant mortality rate of 80 per 1,000 live births. Those numbers drop to 39 and 19, respectively, where CWS is at work.
Among keys to success are female doctors in Basic Health Units and women's clinics and a corps of Female Volunteer Community Health Workers, who are trained in disease prevention and treatment, immunizations, nutrition, HIV/AIDS awareness, and reproductive health, including safe childbirth at home.
At a recent training in Pakistan, one Female Volunteer Community Health Worker recounted how many Afghan refugee women died during childbirth because there were complications and no one knew what to do.
"They could not even go to the hospital, because they could not afford the high cost of emergency transportation," she said. Similarly, no one could afford to actually pay a doctor. Furthermore, strict cultural norms prohibit Afghan women from being seen by a male doctor -- and female medical practitioners are in short supply.
"Now," the health worker said, "women like us are learning to help with childbirth, and we can stop some of these things from happening, or we know what to do if they happen."
Over its 27-year history, the CWS Community Health Project has helped foster significant shifts in Afghan communities' views of health and its importance. Perhaps most astonishing is the way men have come to understand the need for adequate health care for women and children, and the fact that they now support women in the role of providing for the health of other women and children.
By DSDP Program Officer Jennifer Hendrick and CWS Great Rivers Regional Director Janet Young, who visited Pakistan together in December 2006.
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