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The Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) Situation Report is a monthly column highlighting policies and issues around the world.  This month, I’m taking a closer look at maternal death in Kenya.

The East African Caravan for Maternal Health launches in Kenya

Because of it’s relative stability, Kenya is a popular travel and study abroad destination, and has loads of international players working there– including USAID.  Contraceptive prevalence in Kenya hovers around 30%, and the fertility rate is between 4 and 5 children per woman. 

Maternal mortality rates in Kenya are among the world’s highest; a Kenyan woman has a 1 in 39 lifetime risk of dying because of pregnancy or childbirth.  Something like 15,000 women a year die this way– more than a third from unsafe abortion. 

Direct medical causes for maternal death include hemorrhage, infection, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortion.  As in all poor countries with high maternal mortality rates, the severity of these problems is driven by social factors.  In Kenya, health systems are lacking and infrastructure issues make it difficult to access existing resources.  Moreover, women often lack decision-making power during the entire spectrum of their reproductive lives.  Abortion is illegal, heavily stigmatized, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of Kenyan women every year. Read the rest of this entry →

I recently watched the documentary film Stolen Childhoods, an exposé on global child labor. The movie is, unsurprisingly, sobering, but I enjoyed it because the viewer is given clear instructions on how to work to end child labor (buying Fair Trade products, for example) and introduced to those who are working every day to end this egregious human rights violation. I was struck by how many women were featured in the film as community leaders, and I wanted to highlight their work here.

A young girl shovels instead of studying (photo via noesunjoc on flickr)

Professor Wangari Maathai of Kenya spoke, and was, as always, eloquent and moving. If you have not yet read Elizabeth’s article from last week about Professor Maathai’s work, she gives a great summary of the inspirational leader’s life and accomplishments.

Read the rest of this entry →

Wangari Maathai - by Martin Rowe

“She was disobedient at a time when disobedience was not tolerated.” - Taking Root film

“Taking Root brings to life the confidence and joy of people working to improve their own lives while also ensuring the future and vitality of their land.” – Taking Root website synopsis

Last month, our nation’s capital hosted the 18^th annual DC Environmental Film Festival, which was packed with films meant to highlight and give a fresh look at environmental issues across the world.  One such piece was the documentary Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai hosted by the National Museum of African Art.  The film captures the intersection of three important topics – women, politics and the environment—and it does so by telling the story of how Professor Wangari Maathai forever changed the landscape of her native Kenya.

Born in a rural village, Professor Maathai completed undergraduate and masters studies in the U.S. before returning to Kenya to become the first woman in East Africa to earn a PhD and the first woman in Kenya to head a university department.  While teaching at the University of Nairobi, she developed a side interest in environmental degradation, a project that eventually grew into the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization she founded in 1977 to encourage rural women to plant trees.  This basic act—planting trees—was intended to bring attention to significant issues such as deforestation and water access as well as provide an income source for local women. The GBM continued to grow and thrive, expanding into areas of political activism and awareness campaigns.  In 1989, Professor Maathai led a standoff with the Kenyan government when it set its sights on developing the only remaining park in downtown Nairobi.   Additionally, after an outbreak of ethnic violence between tribes following highly contentious elections in 1991, the GBM added programs to rebuild the sense of community that was lost.  For her efforts and activism, Maathai received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, becoming the first African woman and the first environmentalist to do so. Read the rest of this entry →

Image copyright ACLU

The headline alone could have been cribbed from The Onion: “Most Abortions Now Blamed on Amorous Old Men.” The article goes on to quote a survey that found high abortion rates among young women in central Kenya are due to the philandering of older men.  There are so many things wrong with that thesis I don’t know where to start.

But this article is just one more in a long line of sensationalist and slanted articles on an issue (abortion) that is like a match in a country of tinder.  That latest: Kenya’s new constitution will protect life from conception. (steaming mad face).

While in Kenya this summer, I wrote about the country’s troubled constitutional review process and the precarious state of reproductive rights.  Abortion is already highly restricted despite unsafe abortion being a near-epidemic public health issue, disproportionately burdening low-income and uneducated women.

Now, despite some promising ups, things are looking very, very down.  The current draft of Kenya’s constitution now contains “fetal personhood” language, sanctifying life as beginning at conception and effectively outlawing abortion in all cases, and perhaps even some uses of contraception.

This thorough RH Reality Check post by Ipas’ Gillian Kane puts it well.  The Kenyan Government caved, not surprisingly, to extreme anti-choice religious right, who promised to flex their grassroots muscle, mobilizing millions to vote down the draft constitution if it did not have explicitly prohibitive language on abortion. The draft as it stood had completely neutral language, mind you (well, guaranteed a right to health for all individuals.  How radical!).

Kane makes the important point that opposition to reproductive rights is better connected than we might every think: the same group that pushed the Tebow Super Bowl ad, Focus on the Family, is, in part, behind these oppressive antics in Kenya. Read the rest of this entry →

Satellite Image of Lake Turkana via Wikipedia

Last week, the Gibe III hydroelectric power plant in Ethiopia has to shut down following a tunnel collapse, a problem similar to one suffered by Gibe II, but this is not a permanent closure. The impact of this project highlights some of the paradoxes and problems of hydroelectric energy, as subject I’ve blogged about before in the contexts of China and the American Pacific Northwest. While dams provide electricity without the greenhouse emissions of coal-burning plants, they can hardly be called green or clean given the damage they do to local ecosystems. Gibe III endangers the balance of the world’s largest desert lake, Lake Turkana, and in so doing it threatens the ability of more than half a million people who live around the lake to get enough to eat. The hundreds of thousands of indigenous people who live in the Omo River Valley will see their agriculture disrupted by changes to the river’s flood cycle. These groups were not consulted during the dam planning process. Read the rest of this entry →

The Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Situation Report is a monthly column highlighting SRHR issues internationally.  In honor of World AIDS Day, December 1st, this month’s column will focus on Women and HIV/AIDS worldwide.

Halting the spread of HIV/AIDS is part of Millennium Development Goal 6, linked with “malaria and other diseases.”  The major international funding body for AIDS, the Global Fund works on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, as the epidemiological issues are similar.  Health outcomes for women and girls lag behind those of men for all of these diseases, but women face added vulnerability and stigma in the case of HIV/AIDS.  According to UNAIDS, “gender inequality both fuels and intensifies the impact of the HIV epidemic,” and “women often experience the impact of HIV more severely than men.”  This is for a variety of reasons, which as in the case of maternal mortality, can only be truly addressed through the empowerment of women. Read the rest of this entry →

HIV/AIDS is a problem. Huge problem. At GAB, we’ve written about HIV/AIDS issues all over the world (many can be found here, here, and here). The discussion is endless, because it affects all types of people no matter their race, gender, class, ethnicity, or sexuality, and is an important health issue to overcome in underdeveloped and developed countries. Below is a short (12-minute) documentary that was filmed in Kenya about the HIV risks women have in marriage titled “The Silent Partner: HIV in Marriage” (by Population Action International).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJa0ALKmkF4]

If you’re interested in reading more about current HIV/AIDS issues, below are posts from other blogs. Check ‘em out!

Human Rights: When Officials Get Serious About HIV Prevention, This is Where They’ll Start (from rhrealitycheck.org)

CDC says AIDS 50 Times Higher in Gays, Bi Men (from the Bilerico Project)

AIDS on the rise in Cuban Youth (from The Lancet Student)

Treatment Action Campaign Urges Clinton to Work For More HIV/AIDS Funding (from Science Speaks, Center for Global Health Policy)

A study just released by the Guttmacher Institute finds that the approval, in 2000, of the drug Mifepristone (known to others as RU-486 or the Abortion Pill) for medication abortion did not have the anticipated effect of extending new abortion access to rural and under-served areas of the U.S.

This is disappointing news, given that there’s still so much to be done to ensure access to abortions in the U.S., where 87% of counties still have no abortion provider.  Persistent and pernicious actions by anti-choice lawmakers have continued to erode abortion access all across the country and what the study makes clear is that we can’t take access for granted.

Photo by Alisha Ann

Looking beyond the U.S., however, the study provides an opportunity to highlight the way in which the use of misoprostol alone is expanding access to safe abortion services in the developing world, where the vast majority of unsafe abortions occur.  (Misoprostol is Mifepristone’s companion drug, or the second drug given as part of a medication abortion.) Read the rest of this entry →

On the heels of the much talked about Waki List, another list has surfaced to the ire of increasingly cynical Kenyans. 

Prime Minister Odinga has named a list of high ranking officials illegally owning land in Kenya’s prized Mau Forest, which has been increasingly allotted, burned and inhabited over the years to the detriment of the environment and water supply countrywide. 

This means it’s increasingly difficult to access clean drinking water and firewood, for which many women in Kenya are responsible on behalf of their families.  In other parts of the world, water and firewood shortages have meant women walking further and to places where their security is jeopardized.  The destruction of the Mau Forest has meant erosion, drought and a slew of other environmental burdens — which in parts of the country fall heavily on its women.

Famed environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, has campaigned for years on the conservation and reforestation of water shed areas throughout Africa, including the Mau Forest.  Maathai intertwines environmentalism with feminism and the empowerment of especially poor communities.  Read the rest of this entry →

President Obama has a unique opportunity to put pressure on Kenya’s leaders to improve their record on reproductive health and rights.  And that opportunity is now.  

The right to reproductive health should be entrenched in the constitution. The only way we can reduce maternal fatalities in the country is by making abortion rare, safe and legal.
- Professor Jospeh Karanja, Kenya Medical Association

Kenya is in the midst of a complicated Constitutional review process, during which contentious issues in the current constitutional drafts can be debated and amended through public fora.  Since the 1990’s Kenyans have been waiting for a finalized constitution and can’t yet seem to agree.  One issue that continues to stir intense debate is reproductive rights, specifically abortion.  Yesterday reproductive rights activists faced off against religious leaders to debate.

Read the rest of this entry →