Association Profiles
Keziah M. Kapesa;
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2. CEDPA: Alumni Stories
Advocating for safe motherhood, Kapesa held a recent press conference to call the Tanzania media to action in covering the issue. As the Executive Secretary of Private Nurses/Midwives Association of Tanzania (PRINMAT), Kapesa said the media should closely work with organizations working to improve safe motherhood to increase awareness on the issue. "This would go a long way to change the wrong perception by the people that giving birth is only a woman's concern," she stated. In a recent e-mail, Kapesa said she owes a lot of her advocacy and management skills to the Women in Management training she attended in 2000. With skills learned at the WIM workshop, she has established a monitoring and evaluation program to track program results. Her advocacy skills helped her reach the Deputy Minister for Disaster and HIV Prevention Campaign to promote midwife training on HIV counseling. She explained, "The Minister was happy to learn that there is a group of midwives serving women at the grassroots communities in pregnancy and child birth." She added, "I have managed to reach and talk to those influential people because at CEDPA I was taught communication and how to talk in difficult situations."
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3. Villagers attend safe motherhood seminar
Training about 70 women from Kisauke, Madala, Mivumoni and Kulangwa villages in Dar es Salaam, Private Nurses/Midwives Association of Tanzania (PRINMAT), Executive Secretary, Keziah Kapesa said such skills would go along way in ensuring safe motherhood.
She said many women die as a result of complications during delivery, which if handled by skilled hands, the life of the mother and the baby would be saved.
Citing an example of a woman, who recently visited one of the PRINMAT centres and after being examined it was discovered that her baby had been wrongly positioned in the womb and was subsequently referred to the Muhimbili National Hospital.
She said if such a woman never went to hospital, her case would have been a total disaster.
In an interview with The Guardian, Kapesa said at the end of the course, the women would be used as special envoys in educating other members of the community, including men on the importance of using official health centres on all pregnancy and delivery matters.
She said her organisation had decided to give women first priority knowing the fact that they were the most affected group by the issue of safe motherhood.
'When talking of reproduction and safe delivery, we target the safety of mothers and their babies in the course of delivery, a process which involves attending the clinic regularly as advised by physicians,' she explained.
'Women should not wait until it's too late before they go to a nearby clinic or health centre. Failure to do so means risking your life,' she said.
The training, she said, was part of a series of similar courses being offered by the organization for three days from Wednesday at various centres in Kigamboni , Magomeni, Kagera and Mikoroshini.
According to Kapesa, the courses are being run under a special programme intended to give women skills to help them tackle problems related to pregnancy and delivery.
'This project aims at educating women from rural areas on importance of not seeking medical services from traditional healers but instead from nearby formal health care facilities,' she said.
she also said PRINMAT intention was essentially to help communities reduce deaths of women caused by various complications relating to pregnancy and delivery.
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