India

WRA India Engages Champions and Involves Media to Raise Awareness of Safe Motherhood

Engaging Champions for Safe Motherhood to reduce maternal deaths

To improve maternal health in India and to contribute to the achievement of MDG5, more community stakeholders need to advocate for their rights to improved maternal and child health services. National and state-level political leaders need to exert greater pressure on their district-level colleagues to make government commitments a reality. Media and other opinion leaders should increase their role as public watchdogs to ensure that funds are being spent on effective interventions that improve maternal and child health.

WRA members worldwide have been utilizing champions and public figures to raise awareness about maternal health. Use of these champions not only increases awareness and credibility but also fosters a sense of trust for that cause/brand among the target audience.

WRAI has been making efforts to bring champions together at a common platform. A meeting was organized on January 6, 2011. Six committed individuals — Ms. Binoo Sen (former Member Secretary of the National Commission for Women), Ms. Sunita Kohli (founder of National Museum of Women in the Arts in India), Ms. Kamana Prasad (Urdu scholar, poet and ardent proponent of gender equity), Ms. Shivani Wazir Pasrich (an actor and former beauty queen), Ms. Kusum Haider (a well known theatre personality) and Ms. Coomi Kapoor (one of India's leading political columnists)—signed on as new champions for maternal health in India.

One of the new champions, Ms Shivani Wazir Pasrich, has been successfully staging a play called "Draupadi: Will my spirit live on?" During one of the stagings, messages on Safe Motherhood were disseminated, motivating people to speak up for promoting maternal health.

(Left) Discussion during the lecture (Right) Mr. Biraj lecturing on Food Security and Maternal Health

Media coverage on India's leading TV news channel NDTV 24x7

In 2010, WRA India organized an interaction with prominent Media representatives to discuss various ways the media could play a more prominent role in highlighting the issue of safe motherhood. A senior journalist, Ms. Sutapa Deb from NDTV 24x7, visited districts of Orissa along with WRA India's Orissa chapter and wrote a story highlighting the real situation on the ground for pregnant women and their families. This news story was telecast as an episode of a very a popular series called "India Matters" on November 11, 2010. The story highlighted three maternal deaths and called attention to the fact that government health services are still not available to the poorest and the most needy. To view this news report, please visit the link http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/news/why-arewomen-dying-in-childbirth/175210.

WRAI has also formed a core group of committed journalists to lead advocacy and help prepare strategies for better advocacy of maternal health in the media.

WRA India's inaugural lecture on "Food Security and Maternal Health"

WRAI is organizing a series of lectures focusing on the connections between maternal health and other development parameters. Some of the topics of this lecture series would be "Food Security and Maternal Health in India", "Economics of Health" and "Privatisation of Health Services in India."

The first lecture, "How does food security impact maternal health?" was organized on on 3rd November 2010. Biraj Patnaik, Principal Adviser to the Office of the Supreme Court Commissioners in the Right to Food Case examined the many dimensions of the issue. Mr. Patnaik is also one of the co-founders of the Mitanin Programme that
trained and deployed over 60,000 women community health workers in Chhattisgarh.

Mr. Patnaik further said mothers face on-going, chronic health challenges. Due to the high demands on their time and labour, they often do not have resources to commit to their own health; more than one-third of married women have a chronic energy deficiency.

Acknowledging that there is plethora of schemes in India, Mr. Patnaik lauded the intergraded approach for nutrition security and maternal health as steps towards the right direction.