Ulrich Vital Ahotondji

COTONOU, May 11 2011 (IPS) – Training of midwives in the active management of the third stage of labour targets one of the most common causes of maternal deaths: bleeding after delivery.
In Benin, the maternal mortality ratio is 397 deaths for every 100,000 live births, and bleeding after delivery alone is responsible for 25 percent of these deaths, says Dr René Daraté, director of maternal and child health at the Ministry of Health.

The government of Benin has therefore found it necessary to introduce, among other things, the Canadian technique of active management of the third stage of labour (AMTSL) to save women from post-partum haemmorhage, Daraté said.

According to Daraté, himself an obsterician and gynaecologist, AMTSL is an…

Mehru Jaffer

VIENNA, Jun 13 2011 (IPS) – When Farah s 16-year-old son began to disappear for several nights a week without saying where he went, she was naturally worried. After he returned one day and shattered the television screen in their Peshawar home, the mother of three decided it was time to quit her job as a teacher and to find out what was making her youngest child so angry.
To her horror, the schoolteacher who requested that her real name not be published discovered that her son was spending time in the company of people belonging to terrorist groups in Pakistan s Swat Valley where Farah s family originally comes from. The boy s newly found friends were teaching him that it is a sin for his mother to leave home to work everyday and for his sister, a medical student…

Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 23 2011 (IPS) – Some 13 million people across Europe, Russia, and other parts of the world remain largely dependent on Afghanistan s poppy production to fuel their addiction to heroin, according to a new U.N. report on global use of illicit drugs.
Yes, Afghanistan is on top of the list, Thomas Pietschmann, a researcher at the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told IPS.

Last year, more than 210 million people around the world used illegal substances such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis, as well as prescription opioid drugs and new synthetic drugs, said. But while global markets for cocaine, heroin and cannabis declined or remained stable, the production and abuse of prescription drugs rose.

The gains we have witnessed i…

Edgardo Ayala

SAN SALVADOR, Jul 27 2011 (IPS) – Two years into his term, El Salvador s first-ever leftwing president, Mauricio Funes, finds himself more and more distanced from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) that brought him to power and from the promises of change that got him elected, analysts say.
Some of the moves made by Funes have not been the ones expected by the voters who put him in office with 51 percent of the vote in the March 2009 elections.

He has not lived up to expectations, and I perceive a gradual disillusionment which, like a cup, is filling up drop by drop, Omar Serrano, a vice rector at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University, told IPS.

Funes, a former CNN journalist and popular TV host, did not even joi…

MOGADISHU, Sep 5 2011 (IPS) – Masses of food meant for famine victims in Somalia are being stolen, an investigation has revealed.

Mothers and their babies queue for food aid at the Raghe Ugas School in Waberi, Mogadishu. Credit: Shafi’i Mohyaddin Abokar

There is widespread food aid corruption, that is why I am calling for the establishment of a special food aid monitoring group — this must include Somalis and the forei…

Edgardo Ayala

SAN SALVADOR, Oct 18 2011 (IPS) – Eric Saúl Majano stares blankly up at the ceiling in the government office in the Salvadoran capital that he is visiting to seek a disability pension, since he has been unable to work since 2002 due to schizophrenia. But achieving his goal will not be easy.
I see and hear things that aren t real; that s why I can t work, Majano, 37, explains to IPS after leaving the doctor s office where he was examined.

Since El Salvador s social security system was privatised in 1998, 35 percent of the 18,000 workers who have applied to the government commission that evaluates eligibility for a disability pension, the CCI, have been turned down after medical exams on the grounds that their degree of disability does not warrant a pens…

Miriam Gathigah

BUSAN, Dec 1 2011 (IPS) – Billions of people are marking yet another World AIDS Day this one themed Getting to Zero , for zero AIDS-related deaths, zero new infections, and zero stigma and discrimination.
But in Africa, what may be needed is zero tolerance for corruption so that funds required to fight HIV/AIDS and create awareness around the virus do not get siphoned away.

In East Africa alone, Uganda has had its main source of HIV funding suspended. Kenya has, on several occasions, come close to a similar fate due to evidence of massive misappropriation of HIV funding, says John Peter Kaguruzi, a public policy analyst in Rwanda.

In Djibouti, of the 5.3 million dollars given as an anti-HIV grant, 750,000 dollars were spent on expenditure tha…

KARACHI, Jan 29 2012 (IPS) – It was a dark and dingy room, where an elderly woman asked me to take off my panties, made me sit on a low wooden stool with my legs parted and then did something…I screamed out in pain, recalls Alefia Mustansir, 40, of her childhood experience.

A Bohra woman in traditional costume. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

Her friend, Sakina Haider, remembers putting up a good fight before she succumbed. I was told by my grandmother that I was being taken to the doctor to address burning in the genital area when soap went there…

Beena Sarwar

BOSTON, U.S., Mar 8 2012 (IPS) – When the Oscar-nominated film Saving Face won an Academy Award in Hollywood for Best Documentary (Short Subject), it was the triumph of several firsts : the first time ever that a Pakistani filmmaker had won an Oscar; Pakistan s first Oscar winner was a woman; and it was the first time that an American and a Pakistani had co-directed an Oscar-winning film.

More Toilets in Zimbabwe, Better Livelihoods

tina September 25, 2024 0