Cover Story Sidebar
Encouraging Safer Births

In a remote village of the Jumla district in Nepal, lack of awareness and a shortage of medical care resulted in an above-average number of rural women dying in childbirth.

While expecting her second child, 20-year-old Jarsikala Kami was encouraged by a village development committee volunteer to visit a local birthing center.

“We took Jarsikala there on a homemade stretcher,” says her mother-in-law. “My granddaughter was born the next day with the help of a skilled birth attendant.”

When she was discharged, Ms. Kami was given the equivalent of about $30 to buy food—part of the Government of Nepal’s policy to encourage women to deliver babies at hospitals and health centers. It is working. The latest available data show 281 cases of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births annually, compared with 539 deaths in 1995. •