Our mission at the Faith-Based Coalition for Healthy Mothers and Children Worldwide is to create advocates for maternal health, infant and children’s health, and for the healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies for women in developing world. This includes mothers in Africa, India, Mongolia, Guatemala, and everywhere where moms and children are living in extreme poverty. Where 222 million women (mostly married) want access to contraception, but it’s simply not available where they live.

It’s hard for us in the United States to get outside of our own experience when we look at these issues. The debate about domestic healthcare rages on, and it’s difficult for us to separate this from international maternal health. But once we’re able to imagine a daily experience outside our own, the need for advocacy becomes crystal clear.

Photo (c) Unicef

In the country of Niger, for example, 75 percent of girls become child brides. Of course, this is the country that has the highest prevalence of child marriage, but the truth is that young girls—often around eleven years old—are regularly given in marriage across Africa and southeast Asia. When these girls marry, they’re often forced to leave school, stunting their intellectual development and their social growth. They've also frequently not been educated about reproduction, and their young bodies simply are not ready to become mothers, evidenced by the fact that a girl is 10-14 times more likely to die in childbirth if she has her children before the age of 18.

Or consider Beatrice Namulondo. She was 13 when first became a mother, and she had dreams of raising a small family of children. But at age 36 she’s now mother to 17, because she had no access to any kind of contraception. This is compounded by the fact that the women in her village told her timing and spacing her pregnancies to suit the life she dreamed of and to match what she was economically and emotionally prepared to care for would make her weak and unable to work her garden, when the exact opposite is the truth.

But good work is being done to turn the tide, and in countries like Ethiopia the maternal mortality rate is dropping, the country’s GDP is rising, and political leaders believe these things are intimately connected. With Ethiopia’s Health Extension Worker (HEW) program, women and children receive visits from the 38,000 HEWs like Miheret, who travel to hard-to-reach places (like Ethiopia’s border with South Sudan) to administer vaccines, test for diseases like diarrhea or pneumonia, and monitor the hygiene in the home. Women are given access to contraception and maternal care when they do choose to have children. The results are staggering—child mortality has been slashed in half, poverty rates are down, and twice as many children are in school.

If you want to learn what you can do to help more women get access to this kind of life-saving assistance, visit our Faith-Based Coalition for Health Mothers and Children Worldwide page and see what advocacy activities we’re involved in at the moment. Follow us on Twitter @HTHHglobal and on Facebook. We need you!