For over20 years, Bread and Water for Africa® has been working in Sub-Saharan African countries such as Sierra Leone, Kenya, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Zambia to ensure that expectant mothers are able to safely give birth to healthy baby girls and boys.hos
Through our support of the construction of a new hospital operated by our partner Hope Services in Cameroon, the Kebeneti SDA Dispensary in Kericho, Kenya, and numerous clinics operated by our partners in Sierra Leone, we have strived to save the lives of mothers and their young children.
We can sympathize with the millions of mothers in Sub-Saharan Africa who lose their children to easily preventable diseases and malnutrition and mourn the deaths of their children for the rest of their lives.
That sad fact was brought home to us in a recent report stating that while most parents living in industrialized countries today reasonably presume that their children will survive childhood, but child death remains woefully common in some parts of the world, particularly in certain Sub-Saharan African countries where a baby born is roughly 20 times more likely to die in early childhood than a baby born in the U.S. or Western Europe.
The Washington Post reported that 3.3 million children died in 2018 in sub-Saharan Africa in 2018 alone.
And it is their mothers who bear the burden of grief.
According to the study, between one-fourth and one-half of women in sub-Saharan Africa lost a child during their lifetimes, and more than 20 percent had lost a child younger than 5 years old.
“In the shadows of the high child mortality rates are millions of grieving mothers who bear the personal, social and martial costs of a child’s death,” states the study, which points to a “bereavement burden” that affects what women worry about, how they make decisions and even how healthy they are.
In Kenya, the good news is that remarkable progress has been made in improving child survival over the past three decades, but the sad news is that there is still a long way to go as one in every 19 children not reaching their fifth birthday.
Over the past two decades, thanks to the supporters of Bread and Water for Africa®, untold thousands of children grew up healthy and today are living happy successful lives with children of their own because of the health care their mothers received while expecting, and the health care they received as children at the free and low-cost clinics and hospitals operated by our partners.
