Though the disease is painful and can be lethal without proper care, an inexpensive vaccine can stop it. UNICEF has immunized over million women in 53 countries to eliminate the disease in more than three dozen countries. UN agencies are working every day to improve the health — and the lives — of mothers everywhere.
And since our founding, the UN Foundation has made supporting the UN on this issue a pillar of our work. We work with the UN and partners to improve maternal health and reproductive health and rights — from expanding access to contraception to harnessing solar energy to power health facilities in Uganda and Ghana.
View All Blog Posts. This in turn leads to a lack of ability to delay pregnancy and early marriage, she added. Yet the panelists collectively noted that the systems in place for maternal care are dysfunctional and lead again and again to preventable deaths.
The original UN MDGs, developed in , set eight objectives for poverty, education and global health for the next 15 years. Aubrey had surgery to fix her skull when she was 2 years old. To put it in perspective, her birthdate is June 3, but my due date was Oct. The hospital was our first home as a family of three and we knew she was receiving the best care possible there. We were lucky. Now Aubrey is 4 years old and the sweetest, talkative, independent little lady!
Together, we can push for systematic change that works to level the playing field for Black moms, as I know many are not as fortunate as I was. Everyone deserves the same chance to be healthy.
This article is from Nurture KC. A mother uses professional antenatal care and makes frequent antenatal visits if she has an educated partner Hypotheses 3 and 6. The results indicate, however, that a father must have at least 11 years of education to affect the use of professional antenatal care Columns 4 and 5. Additionally, incident rate ratios from the negative binomial coefficients suggest that a mother is expected to make 1.
Efforts to disseminate health knowledge and practices via the mass media appear helpful Hypotheses 2 and 5. Access to media messages influences the use of professional antenatal care and antenatal visits. Among the controls, we find that relatively younger mothers and mothers with fewer children aged 5 and under at home and presumably little or no experience with pregnancy have a higher propensity to seek routine professional antenatal care Columns 1—6.
The likelihood of the use of professional antenatal care and frequent antenatal visits are higher in urban communities in the plains compared with rural communities in mountains or hills. All in all, education appears to be a robust predictor of the routine use of professional antenatal care. However, educated fathers have a more important role to play in the use of routine professional antenatal care than previous studies suggest.
We further find that media messages play an independent role in inducing the use of routine professional antenatal care. Table 4 presents OLS and 2SLS parameter estimates of the effect of use of professional care and antenatal visits on child health.
The use of professional antenatal care and antenatal visits are behavioral inputs to child health and change systematically with variation in educational attainment and exposure to media messages, among others Table 3.
Given such endogeneity, we utilize estimates of the use of professional antenatal care and antenatal visits from the first-stage analysis to obtain the second stage estimates of the child health production parameters. Decisions that a mother makes about the type of antenatal care to use during pregnancy and the regularity of antenatal visits matter for health in the infant and toddler years in Nepal Hypothesis 7.
Children, on average, are less malnourished relative to the US reference population when a mother uses professional antenatal care. Results are robust to variations in sample, time and estimation techniques, and support our hypothesis that the use of routine antenatal care matters for child health.
Age matters for child health but gender does not. The negative coefficient on age indicates that, in Nepal, as a child ages, his or her health deteriorates. Child health meets the international standard for months after birth, but begins to fall below the median of the US population in and as children age beyond a threshold level. Male and female children are equally likely to face health threats in their infant and toddler years in Nepal, indicating that parents rear female children as well as they do male children as young as 36 months.
Healthy mothers have healthy children. We find an increase in maternal weight increases weight-for-age z -scores for children, and the effect is sizeable. Height and weight carry genetic effects, however, and the available NDHS data prevent us from distinguishing between social and biological effects. Height and weight pick up some unobserved household heterogeneity. We therefore attempt to control for some aspects of unobserved household heterogeneity by including height and weight, and note that maternal care and antenatal visits remain robust predictors as a result.
Among the remaining controls, we fail to establish any systematic differences in health between children born into Hindu vs non-Hindu families. Differences in sanitation seem to matter more than differences in water supply for child health. Children are better nourished when households have access to pit latrine services than when they lack any interior sanitation facilities at all. The Heckman selection model a estimates the selection model—the prenatal care utilization equation, b calculates the expected error for each observation and c treats the estimated error as an explanatory variable in estimating the child health equation.
The model, therefore, allows the unobservable attributes affecting the demand for prenatal care to be correlated with the unobservable attributes affecting child health, and thereby subjects the estimates to another demanding test. Years of Safe Motherhood interventions have failed to deliver expected gains in maternal and child health in Nepal. Our study has not only confirmed prior findings but also furthered our understanding of antenatal care use in Nepal and in South Asia at large.
Our analysis of NDHS data collected in and suggests that a maternal education encourages the routine utilization of professional antenatal care, b women married to educated men are significantly more likely to use antenatal care than women married to men with little or no schooling and finally c children are more likely to be healthy when their mothers maintain good health and seek antenatal care.
Thus, we found that education increases routine antenatal care utilization and that child health improves as a result. However, we must raise a note of caution. First, we have rectified many but not necessarily all sources of endogeneity in antenatal care utilization and, following Maitra , we suggest careful health policy designs in Nepal, among other South Asian countries.
Second, maternal education may not bring contemporaneous attitudinal or behavioural changes towards maternal health care in patriarchal Nepal; a similar concern is raised by Basu , Jeffery and Jeffery and Mumtaz and Salway Education of the father is critical. We show that educated fathers are more central to maternal demand for antenatal care than implied by conventional wisdom. Mass dissemination of health information and health practices via the media or other sources complements formal education by increasing enthusiasm and awareness of maternal health care.
Mothers and children benefit in the process. Special appreciation goes to Andrew Schrank for his guidance and editorial comments throughout the revisions of the paper.
The authors argue that screening for poor maternity history is effective in reducing maternal mortality and morbidity, and that the effectiveness of many routine procedures is questionable. Whereas the latter have been available since the s, the Ministry of Health in Nepal did not create maternal health posts staffed by female maternal and child health workers until Acharya and Cleland See Say and Raine for a comprehensive review of the determinants of maternal health care in developing countries.
Low use of antenatal care prevails in India Pallikadavath et al. Maternal education is thus strongly correlated with parental and spousal socio-economic status. Routine antenatal visits are an important determinant of having a trained attendant at birth Bloom et al. Not surprisingly, studies use either the number of antenatal visits or the timing of the first antenatal visit to measure antenatal care utilization Bloom et al.
Nonetheless, we have conducted a survival analysis of time in months to the first antenatal visit we thank one of the reviewers for this suggestion. Data on time to the first antenatal visits are available only for those mothers who used professional antenatal care in their previous pregnancy.
Results are available upon request. It arises from self-selection, measurement error and simultaneity Wooldridge : 50— Strauss and Thomas summarize the studies showing the direct correlation between health infrastructure and child health. The 3SLS allows us to estimate Equations 3 and 4 simultaneously as a system of equations. We find consistent results regardless.
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