We hope you have all started the year 2020 with joy! Still eleven months left so the year is still fresh enough to get packed with happiness, health and human rights for all, including poor pregnant women in underserviced areas of Africa!
Beyond backstopping the work on the ground with training the health care staff, the Community Health Workers and the women themselves in the use of the JamboMama! app, SAHFA also has advocacy challenges as a platform for the second digital revolution. As SAHFA-president and founder Laetitia van Haren is preparing to give a presentation in New York in March at a panel about maternal mortality reduction and woman’s empowerment, organised by the Mothers Legacy Project in connection with the 64th annual summit of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, we would like to say some more about our advocacy role today.
SAHFA is active in the global information society. On our website and Facebook page, we display the various forms of inequality in the access to modern health care services. How being left out of the digital revolution aggravates one’s vulnerability. Worst off are pregnant women in under-serviced areas. During pregnancy, childbirth and post-partum, they run grave, avoidable risks of an often horrible death because they can’t get help on time or their community decided they needed help when it was too late.
Instructing the most forgotten women with relevant health literacy, teaching them basic digital literacy, giving them an information, education and coordination tool that makes it possible to have safer, better spaced, happier pregnancies with better outcomes for mother and child; this comprehensive set of objectives makes SAHFA an associative movement with a concept and tools which are truly modern, crafted to suit a plethora of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The time to bring digital literacy to rural women is now. We must put our resources and skills together to produce good edifying digital tools and applications. Together we must demand digital tools with relevant information verified by independent experts. Tools empowering everyone, without exception, to lead healthy lives: smart access to health care, healthy living, habitat and human rights for all!
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