The rainy season is coming to an end here in Zambia and the early morning sun floods the car as we pull through the front gate of Professor Nkandu Luo’s house in Lusaka to join her for breakfast. Luo is the former (and outspoken) Minister of Health who now leads two Zambian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) tackling HIV/AIDS and women – the Society of Woman Against AIDS in Zambia (SWAAZ) and Tasintha, the only local organization focused on helping women leave commercial sex work. It is a survival strategy for many women in countries like Zambia with weak economies and high unemployment.
"Reproductive health has been left behind. We can’t fight HIV/AIDS unless we center it within sexual and reproductive health. The majority of those affected by and living with HIV/AIDS are women, especially young women in Zambia,” she thunders. Zambia’s draft reproductive health policy—first proposed ten years ago by Luo during her tenure leading the Ministry—remains untouched. It was never finalized nor implemented by her successors.
During this time, HIV/AIDS treatment became the rallying cry for donors and broader sexual and reproductive health (SRH) issues were sidelined. “We forget that our HIV prevalence rate of 16 percent means that 84 percent of Zambians are presumed HIV negative. Yet HIV prevention and SRH services were abandoned. We’ve lost a lot of ground there,” Luo laments.
Since then, Zambia has made little to no progress in women’s reproductive health and rights. The rate of maternal death in Zambia is unbearably high and has defiantly climbed upwards. Lack of access to obstetric care and transport, compounded by the paucity of midwives, doctors and other trained health care workers throughout the country are to blame. The high incidence of unsafe abortion—due to weak family planning/reproductive health infrastructure on the front-end and non-existent safe abortion services when and where needed— also conspire to create this sorry state of maternal health.
Preliminary findings from the 2007 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) are due out next month. Professor Luo and others believe the long-overdue DHS will show more of the same. “There’s a lot of hand-wringing about mothers dying of preventable causes, but no real money, no concrete action to address this catastrophe. It is to our nation’s shame that we sit and do nothing while our mothers and daughters die.”
Stay tuned for more news from Zambia!
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