access to health care

Enfants du Monde facilitates access to health services

In Burkina Faso, West Africa, many of children have the surname "born en route" because their mother did not manage to get to the health centre in time and gave birth on the street. Access to care is restricted not only by the long distances between the villages and the health centre, but also because of the poor conditions of the roads, making them unusable during the rainy season.

Another impediment to receiving quality healthcare in Burkina Faso is the lack of transportation and/or its high cost. Enfants du Monde focuses on improving access to health facilities in order to allow pregnant women, mothers and their newborns to have easier access and the opportunity to benefit from care. We organise round table discussions with the local population to find the optimal solutions, together, for improving access to health services.

Our strengths:

• Fewer births occur “en route” or at home.
• Our work in health education encourages families to prepare for the birth, in particular by making sure they have organized a mode of transport and by putting aside some money in case there are complications.
• We support communities to build maternity waiting homes near health centres. This way, pregnant women who live far away from the health centre have the possibility of spending their last days of pregnancy there to avoid long and tiring journeys once contractions have started.
• We work alongside the local population to improve access to care, for example by repairing unusable/damaged roads, buying ambulance bikes and mules or to finance small boats which can transport pregnant women to health centres.
• If there are no ambulances available, agreements are sometimes negotiated with taxi drivers or the police to enable emergency transportation to the health centre.
• Some villages have created emergency funds, which can be used by the most impoverished families to finance their care at the health centre in the case of an emergency.