YAOUNDE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – From training community ambassadors to encourage women with fistula to seek treatment, to cash for transport to hospitals, African nations are finding new ways to deal with the agonizing childbirth injury that ruins the lives of millions of girls and women.

In Western countries, obstetric fistula was eradicated more than a century ago, and is today almost unheard of.

Yet despite being preventable, across the developing world, more than 2 million girls and women still suffer from the painful, debilitating condition.

Almost all of them live in poverty in remote areas with little or no access to health care and often abandoned by their communities – the modern day equivalent of lepers who were ostracized and isolated.

Women who birth at home, often in far-flung rural areas where hospitals are too far away or expensive to reach, are especially at risk of obstetric fistula – a hole that develops between the birth canal and bladder or rectum, caused by prolonged, obstructed labor.

Women are left leaking urine, faeces or both.

“People tell me: here, the women are witches,” said Marie Sebo, a community health worker from eastern Cameroon who helps fistula victims access free surgery.

“A woman who has fistula is completely isolated. People refuse even to eat with her. Her husband abandons her.”

But in recent years, local and international organizations, with support from African governments, have launched a series of initiatives to try to bring the scourge of fistula to an end.

Mobile Money

Mobile phones can play a role in both fistula diagnosis and repair.

Cost is one of the biggest barriers to accessing treatment – in Cameroon, for example, each fistula repair is priced between 300,000 and 600,000 Central African francs ($520-$1,050).

But today, in Tanzania and Kenya, the cellphone-based money transfer service M-PESA covers upfront transportation costs for women who otherwise would not be able to pay for surgery, as part of programs funded by Western governments and NGOs.

And in Burundi, Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone and other countries, telephone hotlines connect women in remote locations to medical information and care.

Initiatives vary from country to country, said Lois Boyle from the Freedom From Fistula Foundation, a UK charity.

“We use M-PESA in Kenya a lot to help women access free treatment, but for example in Sierra Leone, almost none of our patients have a mobile phone,” she said.

In Sierra Leone, instead of transferring credit, the group reimburses the women at the end of their journeys, also providing free accommodation and meals before and after surgery.

Read more: Africa fights fistula with mobile money and community ambassadors

Source: Reuters