Yemeserach Belayne

 

This is the eighth in a series of posts from the Ministerial Leadership Initiative's Learning Collaborative Forum in Ethiopia.

 It’s a startling number: 5.4.

That’s the average number of children per woman in Ethiopia.

Yemeserach Belayneh, the country advisor in Ethiopia for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, told the MLI’s Learning Collaborative Forum today that Ethiopia has made great strides in the last decade in reproductive health issues, but still had a long ways to go. The Packard Foundation funds MLI reproductive health programs in Senegal, Mali, and Sierra Leone.

In 2000, just 6 percent of Ethiopia’s women had access to contraceptives. That increased to 15 percent in 2005 and Belayneh said that recent unpublished surveys found that 25 percent of women now have access.

“Family planning has great bearing in Ethiopia to MDG 5,” she said, referring to the Millennium Development Goal that calls for improvements in maternal health, including a three-quarter reduction in maternal deaths by 2015. “In spite of Ethiopia’s legal framework that fully informs the rights of women, the status of women in the country is still low. The harmful practices of female genital mutilation, abduction, and early marriage are still practiced fairly widely. Family planning makes an important contribution to women's empowerment.”

With an expansion in family planning services, “that will have an immediate impact in untimely pregnancies, delaying the age of marriage, and limiting the number of children,” Belayneh said.

She said Ethiopia’s innovative Health Extension Program, which consists of 30,000 female health workers in communities, ``has really turned around the health sector programs in this country. It’s 100 percent female, and that makes it closer to the women who need family planning services.’’

Still, she noted multiple challenges that exist, including low use of health services, low coverage of skilled deliveries, high health worker turnover, and a weak referral system. “We need solidarity among partners and a shared responsibility,” Belayneh said.  “As we step up our efforts in the final rush to reach MDG 5, we need to use all resources, all our knowledge. We need to keep our eyes open to learn from interventions that work, and one of the most important interventions is family planning services.”

Live-blog from Ethiopia

Part 1: MLI Live-blog from Addis Ababa

Part 2: ‘Its Always Good to Think Big’

Part 3: Mali’s Path to Community Health Insurance

Part 4: ‘A New Dawn’ in Health Care in Sierra Leone

Part 5: Want to Bargain? The Nepalis can Help

Part 6: From Mali to Nepal: The Trail of a Negotiator

Part 7: Ethiopia’s New Plan: ‘It’s going to Really Improve this Place’

Part 9: Gang of Four: Table Talk with Reproductive Health Directors

Part 10: Ethiopia’s Tedros: Four Steps to Owning Health Programs

Part 11: ‘We Want to be Led”

Part 12: ‘We Became Beggars”

Forum Wrap-up, Part 1: Marty Makinen and Amanda Folsom

Forum Wrap-up, Part 2: Rosann Wisman

Photo credit Dominic Chavez.