Small victories: South Africa is struggling to improve kids ’ health decades after apartheid’s demise

KWAZULU-NATAL, SOUTH AFRICA— By her country’s standards at the time, there was nothing too unusual about how Nosipho Mshengu arrived in the world. She was born on the side of the road on 20 September 1993, as her mother tried to get from Mafakatini, a rural village in South Africa where there was then no health facility, to a Roman Catholic clinic an hour away. The bus she awaited was nowhere in sight when time ran out, and Mshengu made her entry then and there. This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. A little more than 14 years later, Mshengu was pregnant herself. Her labor story was different. Because teen pregnancies are high-risk, an ambulance drove her from the government health clinic that opened in Mafakatini in 1999 to Greys Hospital in Pietermaritzburg, the capital of the province of KwaZulu-Natal. The 41-kilometer trip paid off with a smooth delivery and a healthy baby boy, Esihle, now a teenager. Unlike her mother, “I had access,” Mshengu said through a translator. “They took me to experts to give birth in a safe, controlled environment. So my child didn’t have any complications. Neither did I.” It has been nearly 30 years since the demise of apartheid, the system of forced racial segregation and institutionalized discrimination that white South Africans created in 1948 and fought to defend until the early 1990s. Apartheid disenfranchised people who were not white, denied them job opportunities, and f...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news