Child Poverty in Mozambique. A Situation and Trend ... - Unicef

Figure 3.6: Percentage of women attended by a skilled health personnel at delivery
100
%
80
85
89
60
40
32 32
38
47 47
49
51
56
61
20
0
Cabo
Delgado
Zambezia Nampula Niassa Tete Inhambane Sofala Manica Gaza Maputo Maputo
City
Source: DHS 2003
Post-partum care also remains low. About 60 per cent of women who had noninstitutional
births do not receive any kind of post-partum care. Only 12 per cent of
women who had non-institutional births attend some form of health facility up to 2
days after delivery and only 8 per cent do so 3 to 6 days after their delivery. Care
of the newborn falls through the cracks – it is neither prioritised in maternal health
programmes nor in Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) programme,
which until recently only addressed the child from the seventh day onwards. Children
of HIV positive women are not only at risk of HIV infection. Stillbirths, low birthweight,
and prematurity are more common in children born to HIV positive women (Duerr,
2005). Therefore, HIV positive women need to be counselled about these facts in
addition to the follow-up needed for PMTCT, and should therefore be encouraged to
attend for postnatal care as much as for antenatal care and delivery.
4. Child survival
The principal indicator used to measure the level of child well-being and its rate of
change in a country is the under-five mortality rate (U5MR). The rate of under-five
mortality is the result of a wide variety of factors: the nutritional health and the health
knowledge of mothers, the availability, use and quality of maternal and child health
services, income and food availability in the family, the availability of clean water
and safe sanitation, and the overall safety of the child’s environment. The under-five
mortality rate measures one end result of the development process and therefore
presents a good overall picture of the health status of Mozambican children and of
Mozambican society as a whole.
Measuring the rates of neonatal (under one month) and infant (under one year)
mortality is also critical, as these rates acknowledge the particular vulnerability of
newborn children and children in their first year of life. Neonatal mortality in particular
is a reflection of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the child, such as the
mother’s health, the circumstances in which the child is delivered and the care the
newborn received in the first few days of life.
32 The 2003 DHS also indicated that more than half of women deliver at home.
CHILDHOOD POVERTY IN MOZAMBIQUE: A SITUATION AND TRENDS ANALYSIS
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