Late last year I returned to Chimling Village in Sindhupalchowk district, in Nepal, to follow up on maternal health issues. I was impressed and disappointed at the same time.
A view of Chimling village, Sindhupalchowk district, Nepal, on a foggy morning in December 2021.
Late last year I returned to Chimling Village in Nepal’s Sindhupalchowk district to follow up on maternal health issues. I was impressed and disappointed at the same time.
I first visited the cluster of tiny cement houses at the top of a steep, rocky and rutted dirt road in March 2021. My goal was to trace an essential drug called misoprostol, which is used to stop bleeding after birth (also known as post-partum haemorrhage). There was a major shortage of the drug in 2020, so Nepal’s Ministry of Health had requested help from the international community.
Kathmandu-born epidemiologist Dr Lhamo Sherpa says that early in her career she began questioning the treatment of women in Nepal
Working at a community hospital in Bouddha, Kathmandu soon after graduating with a medical degree exposed Dr. Lhamo Sherpa to situations that made her reassess the lives being lived by women in Nepal. For example, “there was this childless couple who came for advice. After all the investigations, when I told him the price for in-vitro fertilization… the husband said that he could get another wife (instead) for 50,000 rupees.”
Maternal health in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh continues to make gains despite huge logistical, financial and cultural impediments
A mother and children in a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. PHOTO: UNFPA
Twenty years ago I visited what were commonly called ‘Bhutanese refugee camps’ in southeastern Nepal. (In fact, they were camps of tens of thousands of Nepali-origin people living in Bhutan who had been brutally evicted from that country, with the tacit assent of regional superpower India. But that’s another story.) The tiny bamboo huts where people had to make their new lives were laid out in regular grids on the beaten earth of Nepal’s Tarai or plains region.
So when I imagined the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, that image of rows upon rows of tidy, tiny, bamboo buildings came to mind. It couldn’t be further from the truth. The massive Rohingya camps (housing close to 900,000 people) are located on hilly terrain. Because the Bangladesh Government refuses to recognize the Rohingya — who fled similar ethnic cleansing in neighbouring Myanmar — as official refugees, their ‘homes’ are not uniform buildings but a collection of irregular huts covering the hills.
I really appreciated this editorial in The Kathmandu Post on Wednesday, 21 July. It linked two things I care about—human rights and maternal health.
A community health unit and a birthing centre were established in Dhiri four months ago but the number of service seekers is minimal. Prakash Baral/TKP
I really appreciated this editorial in The Kathmandu Poston Wednesday, 21 July. It linked two things I care about—human rights and maternal health.
It noted that the United Nations Human Rights Council has just released a statement calling on governments worldwide to ensure that women’s right to sexual and reproductive health is ensured, among other things. The paper linked that with its recent reporting about women in remote areas of Nepal giving birth at home and even in sheds!
A lifesaving drug cannot fix the sorts of systemic maternal health issues that I saw on a trip to one village
A screenshot from the Nepal Now podcast episode on misoprostol.
Almost exactly one year ago Nepal’s health department called an urgent meeting of its partners working in maternal health to ask if any of them could supply misoprostol, a drug used to stop excessive bleeding after childbirth. The Covid-19 lockdown had strangled supply and women in rural Nepal were reportedly dying for lack of the drug.
It took nearly six months for a 1-year supply of misoprostol to arrive via the UN Population Fund and an international non-profit, One Heart Worldwide (OHW), again as a result of the pandemic battering global supply chains. I read about this emergency and wanted to track the pills to their end users—women living in Nepal’s villages who were likely to give birth at home without a skilled birth attendant.
A report in the journal The Lancet Global Health has confirmed initial figures: child deaths are rising in Nepal as anxious, pregnant women avoid health facilities during the Covid19 pandemic.
A report published online in the journal The Lancet Global Health this week revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused 50% fewer women in Nepal than usual to give birth in hospitals, resulting in higher risks for premature births, stillborn deliveries and newborn deaths.
The study, conducted in nine hospitals across Nepal found that the stillbirth rate at hospitals and birthing centres increased from 14 per 1,000 before the lockdown to 21, and the neonatal mortality increased from 13 per 1,000 livebirths to 40.
Researching this article for The New Humanitarian it became clearer than ever that the status of maternal health in Nepal is cloudy at the best of times since accurate data is unavailable. In the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s really a guess.
A woman sits with her baby outside her shop in the city of Bhaktapur near Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, in June 2014. The government says fewer women are giving birth in health facilities during the coronavirus pandemic. (Navesh Chitrakar/REUTERS)
Researching this article for The New Humanitarian it became clearer than ever that the status of maternal health in Nepal is cloudy at the best of times since accurate data is unavailable. In the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s really a guess: everyone assumes it’s getting worse but no one is sure. The local office of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) was supposed to start an assessment with the Government of Nepal late in June but it has yet to begin. Read on:
As home births rise in Nepal, so do fears for maternal health
Home births are rising in Nepal as fewer pregnant women visit hospitals, fuelling fears that the coronavirus pandemic could reverse years of progress on maternal health in the South Asian nation.
The government says less than half of pregnancies are now taking place in health facilities, compared with about 70 percent before coronavirus lockdowns began in March. A separate survey of health facilities across Nepal, conducted by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in April, found that visits by pregnant women had dropped as much as 50 percent.
In June, Nirmala Joshi, 24, walked two hours to her nearest hospital in Baitadi, a mountainous district in Nepal’s remote far west, for her first prenatal check-up.
It was startling to learn that Nepal Prime Minister KP Oli admitted in Parliament on Tuesday that Nepal’s two coronavirus deaths to date represent a failure of his government. This raises the question: when will a leader apologise for the more than 1,200 women who die every year giving birth?
When will a Nepali leader apologise for the 1,200-plus women who die giving birth yearly?
The headline of this story refers to Nepal Prime Minister KP Oli, who a couple of weeks ago admitted in Parliament that his government had failed to prevent COVID-19 deaths. (As I write this Nepal has four COVID deaths). When the article was published on the Nepali Times website the headline was changed, removing that point. Regardless, too many women, and other Nepalis, continue dying because of the broken health system.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Nepal’s first COVID-19 death was that of a new mother. It was startling to learn that Prime Minister Oli admitted in Parliament on Tuesday that Nepal’s two coronavirus deaths to date represent a failure of his government. This raises the question: when will a leader apologise for the more than 1,200 women who die every year giving birth? Continue reading “‘We have failed’ new mothers”
Nepali Times newspaper, which I’ve been connected with on and off since 2005, celebrated its 1,000th issue and 20-year anniversary on 6 March. Congratulations to founder, publisher and Nepali Times dynamo Kunda Dixit!
I wrote an article in Friday’s paper to mark the occasion. See it on the Times website, and below:
Times change, but the Nepali Times stays the same
It was easy for me to get in the door of the Nepali Times after I first moved to Nepal in 2005: Editor Kunda Dixit and I shared ties with the Inter Press Service News agency – me from North America, he from Asia. Continue reading “Happy Birthday Nepali Times!”
Officials from Arun Rural Municipality in Nepal’s Bhojpur district give a rooster to a new mother on 29 March 2019. The programme to support new mothers started in January. Photo: The Himalayan Times
Time for me to walk my talk.
Following up on my last post about not dwelling on the negative in Nepal, I’m highlighting a very small but positive development. Municipal officials in Bhojpur district in the country’s east started a programme in January to visit new mothers.
The view from here 