We need midwives now more than ever before. Today is a day to shine the light on and celebrate the honourable service provided by Tanzanian midwives to our communities, while also highlight the gaps and challenges our midwives face.
Tanzania needs 12,525 midwives by 2015. We need midwives now more than ever before. This theme - chosen for this year's International Day of the Midwife which is marked this Sunday 5th May - is resoundingly true for Tanzania. This is a day to shine the light on and celebrate the honourable service provided by Tanzanian midwives to our communities, while also highlight the gaps and challenges our midwives face.Just who is a midwife? All mothers, and indeed fathers, should be very familiar with who a midwife is. During undeniably the most incredible moment in our lives – the act of giving birth to another life – it is often the midwife who is there comforting, reassuring and providing quality care to the mother at her most vulnerable moment, and crucially, who is highly trained to manage complications at birth.Midwives are inspirational people. The home page of our Mama Ye! website is featuring the story of Tulalemwa, a hugely inspiring midwife from Kihanga community in Iringa region. Her story leaves me quite awestruck, and is testament to the incredible social service so many of our midwives provide across Tanzania. Our midwives often have to walk long distances; work in facilities with wholly inadequate infrastructure and which are ill-equipped; are depended on by and serve a huge number of families; and need to be available at all hours, all days... And yet in this challenging context, our midwives are serving and indeed saving the lives of hundreds of our mothers and babies every day.Having personally just experienced the miracle of another newborn in our lives, a beautiful baby girl safely delivered in the hands of a midwife, I just cannot imagine how any mother should experience childbirth without the expertise and peace of mind of a trained midwife managing the birth.Midwives save livesAnd yet in Tanzania there remain an enormous number of our mothers who experience childbirth without a midwife there to support them. In 2010 there were approximately 2,500 midwives in Tanzania. It is projected that almost four times more midwives - another 10,000 midwives - are needed by 2015 in order to ensure almost all births are attended by a skilled birth attendant.Experts in maternal and newborn health have calculated that if all Tanzanian women had access to the services provided by midwives, then incredibly the lives of up to 5,000 mothers and 32,000 babies could be saved by 2015.It could not be clearer – the opportunity to save the lives of thousands of our mothers and babies just cannot be missed. The White Ribbon Alliance is championing the cause for more midwives in Tanzania, seeking to encourage more of our youth to choose midwifery as a career. Mama Ye! is joining them and the many other stakeholders and wider Tanzanian community to urge our Government to urgently address this shortfall in the number of midwives needed to help our mothers deliver safely.Act nowI urge you to take a moment to remember and celebrate the midwives of Tanzania. Tweet a message of thanks for their hard work, or upload your photographs of support to our Facebook page, or perhaps send us a picture of an inspirational midwife from your community.Let’s collectively rally around and be heard urging our government to do all within their means to dramatically increase the numbers of midwives in Tanzania, and continue to celebrate their services in saving the lives of thousands of our mothers and babies. We need midwives now more than ever before.