Examining maternal, newborn health care in Ethiopia

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Impatient Optimists" blog features two posts on maternal health in Ethiopia. In the first, Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good, writes about her trip to the country to "observe Save the Children's work with frontline health workers." She writes, "Ethiopia, a country of 84 million and one of the world's poorest according to the World Bank, is working diligently to save the lives of women and children; and it's doing it with the help of an army of thousands of women." James notes, "The Ethiopian government has trained over 38,000 health extension workers (HEWs) since 2003 -- all women" (12/11). In the second post, Tesfaye Arage, a nurse in Ethiopia with Marie Stopes International, notes the WHO recently released guidelines (.pdf) on tasksharing on maternal and newborn health care, and he describes how his team in Ethiopia is implementing tasksharing methods (12/11).