African Women Alliance
The health of African mothers and their newborns is one of the major problems concerning health care in Africa. Since there is a great risk for African women of dying during pregnancy and childbirth, the first trend within this problem is maternal death. The chance of becoming permanently physically (and socially) handicapped is also highly present. Next to this problem of maternal death there is perinatal mortality. Both of these problems are targets within the United Nations (UN) Millennium Goals but the current progress concerning these goals is insufficient to reach the targets in time.1
Because the basic women rights also play a major role in the access to health care, the second trend concerning the health problem of African mothers and their newborns is the human right issue. The empowerment of women in their home situation needs to be improved to help solving the problem. The human rights of African women, can provide a legitimate basis to support African women wanting access to health services. Since there is a limited access to pre-, peri- and post-natal care, most women in sub-Saharan Africa can not gain access to health information or health services. Improving this access is a great opportunity for reaching the targets mentioned before. 
A project trying to help reaching these targets is the African Women Alliance, a Medical Expert group in the Netherlands which can provide support to local existing or new delivery centres. By using satellite communication facilities and solar energy, the dependency on local infrastructure is made less important. Local paramedical personnel (i.e. midwives etc.) going along with mobile units can raise awareness and provide care closer to their homes.2 This project aims to reach the two Millennium Goals within a shorter matter of time.




1 http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml
2 http://africanwomanalliance.org/