This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania on April 30, 2025.
Victoria Lyimo and Shimbo Pastory
The world health day this year had as its theme “Healthy beginnings, hopeful futures” highlighting the need for governments to set up collaborative stages that assure survival of mothers and children at birth.
This of course is one important area, but not the totality of it. The World Health Organisation (WHO) launches with the world health day a whole year of advocacy to prevent maternal deaths.
Globally there has been progress in reduction of maternal deaths from 339/100000 deaths to 227/100000 deaths from 2000 to 2015 respectively. Despite the marked decline, progress has been minimal from 2015 to 2020, where the maternal mortality rate is 227/100000 live births.
The Global decline of neonatal deaths has remained minimal (44%), where 2.3million neonates died globally in 2022 (WHO: Newborn Mortality Factsheet, 2024). Majority of these deaths (Maternal & Child) occur in sub Saharan Africa.
The African region has remained with high maternal and child mortality as compared to other regions, which threats the progress towards achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) no. 3.1.
The under-five mortality rate has also declined globally, from 9.9 million deaths to 4.9 million deaths from year 2000 to 2022; this burden is ten times higher in Africa compared to western countries (WHO: GHO Data, 2024), and Tanzania is not excluded.
Local Situation
Since independence Tanzania assumed full responsibility of the health of its Citizens, and there has been a notable progress.
To strengthen the maternal and child health services, the Safe Motherhood Initiative (SMI) was launched by the Ministry of Health (MOH) in 1989, and free maternal and child health was declared in the country since 1994. (cf. MOH: The National Roadmap Strategic Plan to Accelerate Reduction of Maternal, Newborn and Child Deaths in Tanzania 2008-2015).
To strengthen the neonatal care, the country adopted the Baby friendly Hospital services (BFHS) in 1992, and later included maternal and child health issues in the National Health Policy 2007 (cf. sec. 2.4, 5.4), which expounded that the country has guaranteed to safeguard maternal, new-born and child health ( MOH 2007).
The 2007 Policy acknowledged equally that then Tanzania still lagged behind in Millennium Development Goal (esp. MDG 5), as the targets of reduction of maternal mortality by three quarters were not met.
18 years post Policy 2017 credible data reveal significant improvement as maternal mortality has gone down by 80% (as per 2022). Comparing 7 years apart in the implementation, maternal mortality was reduced from 556 (in 2016) to 104 (in 2022) deaths per 100000 live births. The burden has however remained on neonatal deaths have stagnated at 24 deaths per 1000 live births.
This success is attributed to “increased political commitment, increased number of Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (EmONC) facilities, a growing health workforce, a strengthening obstetric referral network, capacity building, mentorship, and the conduct of Maternal and Perinatal Death Reviews and Surveillance at all levels.” (African Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Feb. 2025).
Nonetheless, while there is a lot of improvement there is need for the government to invest more and more in imparting skills to service providers to ensure optimal care and preservation of lives.
There are health centres in rural areas that need more attention in terms of resources and personnel because of inaccessibility and wide coverage areas.
At the moment the M-Mama programme has been widely appreciated for facilitating early referrals and saving lives. More and more similar partnerships with private investors are needed to save lives of mothers and children.
We recommend that there is also need for increased and consistent public awareness, through regular programmes and use of public and social media, to educate people to better care for pregnant and expectant mothers and new-born children, and to respond appropriately to emergencies, by seeking appropriate medical care.
Consistency is key for sustainability. In addition, more work is needed in digitizing and unifying all the health-related data and service frameworks to have more and more smoothly interacting information systems, hence easing communication and heath information sharing across all levels in real time. Maternal and newborn survival foretells the future of our nation.
Victoria Lyimo (NO, MPH) is a Nurse Officer and Programme Officer for Newborn and Child Health in the Ministry of Health. Shimbo Pastory, C.S.Sp. is a Tanzanian writer advocating for positive social transformation, studying at the Ateneo de Manila, University, Manila, Philippines.