CHASE Africa CEO Harriet Gordon-Brown recently spent some time in the Maasai Mara visiting The Maa Trust, who have been a CHASE Africa local partner since 2019.
Health facilities are few and far between in the area, with women and children needing to travel long distances to access services. We collaborated with The Maa Trust to launch their community health programme, to improve access to health information and services and have continued to work together to strengthen and grow the initiative. The programme facilitates Community Health workers to go door to door, alongside mobile outreaches and backpack nurses, as well as men’s forums and an adolescent and youth focused education programme.
CHASE Africa CEO Harriet Gordon-Brown with medical staff
“I attended a mobile outreach clinic, as well as a backpack nurse outreach. Both clearly demonstrated the huge value of making services more accessible, with dozens of women and children attending the mobile outreach for immunisations, antenatal care, family planning and basic curative treatment."
Harriet Gordon-Brown, CEO CHASE Africa
One of the wider consequences of young adolescent girls giving birth is that it leads to higher rates of birth complications and rates of cerebral palsy and other brain damage caused by birth. These complications are down to the simple fact that young girls bodies are often not developed enough for safe delivery. It is not uncommon, as in the case above that young mothers marry and leave the children they have already had in the care of their grandmothers.
Harriet commented:
"The backpack nurse outreach took place on the edge of a “tourist” village not far from the park. , Among the services provided, the nurse also provided medication and support for a disabled child being cared for by their grandmother, who couldn’t afford to take the child to the local clinic, so this was rare and much needed medical support. A referral (and the cost of transport) to local clinic was provided.”
Backpack Nurse clinic
We originally supported The Maa Trust to build a Youth Friendly Centre to offer training and mentoring opportunities for young people which seeded the idea for a Maternal and Child Health Centre, which opened earlier this year. It is a modern health facility, where women can have safe deliveries in a clean, well equipped and well-staffed facility, additional support is available for young mothers. Caesarean sections can also be performed at the centre, previously women would have had to travel on dirt roads for nearly two hours (often on the back of a motorbike) to reach the nearest hospital in Narok. The centre’s medical director is the only doctor, and trained surgeon for a population of approximately 100,000 people
Although CHASE Africa didn’t fund the building if this new facility, it is clear the health programme we have supported was a key factor in identifying the need for the facility. It also developed vital relationships between The Maa Trust and the Ministry of Health and their local health partner Community Health Partners, which were essential precursors to the new facility.
Harriet reflected on the visit to the centre saying:
“Driving back to Nairobi past a stream of safari vehicles taking tourists to see the wonders of the Maasai Mara, I wondered how many know the challenges that local communities, particularly women and children, face in their daily lives. And what a difference it makes when they can access vital health services that most of those off on safari take for granted at home.”
The Maa Trust and another partner, the Smithsonian institute (who carry out research on numbers and movements of various large mammals in the ecosystem) have been working together on a project about environmental justice, gender and resilience. The partnership touches on many areas that our work with the Maa Trust also covers.
The partnership highlights the differences it makes when women have more agency, can realise their rights and engage in more activities. This builds their resilience to both cope with impacts of changing climate and be able to be more active participants in community conservation. Enabling them to have better access to health information and services, particularly around their sexual and reproductive health is a cornerstone to this.
On the discussion with The Maa Trust and the Smithsonian Institute Harriet said:
“ It was both fascinating and energising to discuss the various interconnections between environmental and human health, as well as the importance of ensuring that conservation is more equitable. We spoke about the differences it makes when women can realise their rights and engage in more activities.”
CHASE Africa strives to articulate those links more clearly - to demonstrate how empowering women and breaking down barriers to family planning can also be a key contributing factor to successful community engagement in conservation, which is absolutely vital for the protection of biodiversity and ecosystems.