Success Stories from Our Members in the field

Community Based Partners Bring Effective Care for Mother and Child, CARE
May 14, 2002

In Guatemala, as in much of the developing world, women often have a number of children with very little time between pregnancies. That pattern, unfortunately, is linked to high rates of infant and maternal death.

In remote rural Mayan areas of Guatemala, a program of the American nongovernmental organization CARE tackles that problem by effectively expanding access to reproductive health services and education.

Training community members, mostly women, as family planning educators was the key to success in the 9-year program in the departments of Baja Verapaz and Alta Verapaz, which ended in 2001.

The volunteers educated village women - in culturally acceptable ways -- about the benefits of child spacing, danger signs during pregnancy, when to seek hospital care, postpartum family planning and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

CARE helped the Guatemalan Ministry of Health provide quality family planning services in its clinics, strengthened the competencies of medical staff in 20 clinics, and through advocacy, helped create demand for reproductive health services among rural women.

Partnering with CARE, Guatemala established 53 community clinics to make health care more readily available to 22,400 families in remote areas.

One indication of success: in the PROSARE project area, 23 percent of women now use modern contraceptives, compared with a national average of 8.4 percent among indigenous women in rural areas.