COFEMali Kita

Although not completely finished, as I continue to be stumped going from English to French and back again (making even my English incomprehensible), I wanted to attach the videos I've made for Kita, Mali. It's a smaller town about 3 hours away from the capital Bamako, and is home to one of our project's fastest growing women's groups.

Before you press play, however, you could probably use some background information:

- Mali has one of the lowest contraceptive rates in the world,

at 8.2%. (2006, worldbank.org)

- Mali has the 17th highest maternal mortality rate, at

970 women/100,000 live births. (2005, worldbank.org)

- Mali has the 7th highest infant mortality rate, at a whopping

194/1,000 live births. (2008, worldbank.org)

- Mali experiences more than 800,000 cases of malaria each year,

which account for 30% of outpatient visits, 30% of hospital deaths,

and 17% of childhood deaths, contributing to its unbelievably high

infant mortality rate. (malariafreefuture.org)

Now what this should signal to you is that there is little to no contraceptive use, meaning women are having a lot of children starting at a young age, which creates a high maternal mortality rate. Disease, such as malaria, is prevalent, and when coupled with other issues like malnutrition, diarrhea, and having been produced by a mother whose body may not have been ready to produce a child, the infant mortality rate goes up. Children under-5 then only have an 80% survival rate, such that families continue to have even more children in expectation that theirs may not survive.

It's a pretty vicious cycle; something we at Project Keneya Ciwara II decided not to add into the happy-go-lucky videos we're creating on the women's groups.

Within the scope of the project, we are trying to promote family planning, pre-natal consultations, vaccinations, and malaria prevention, primarily focused on family planning and malaria prevention.

But now that you know the stats, you can understand that we're not just trying to implement "population control" for the hell of it.

Instead, we're using family planning as a means to push back age of first pregnancy and promote birth spacing, so that women's bodies can handle pregnancy. Coupled with sleeping under a mosquito net and anti-malarial drugs during pregnancy, mother and child are given a better chance at survival.

Voila!

So here are the videos we're going to be putting up on our different project's websites, and sending to all the big guns with which we work. We will also be putting them on CD, or even VHS (yes, that still exists), to actually send out copies to the women's groups themselves.

In English:

En Francais: