Video | 'Saving Women's Lives' campaign in Kenya, MT report from Mombasa (1)

Illum editor Julia Farrugia and MaltaToday journalist Rachel Zammit Cutajar have travelled to Mombasa in Kenya to experience, first-hand the problems facing young women having children in Kenya.

The EU-funded campaign “Save Women’s Lives” was started in four EU countries, Germany, Hungary, Malta and the Netherlands, to increase public awareness and influence public opinion on maternal health and its relation to poverty eradication.

Half a million women die in childbirth every year – 99 per cent of which are in the developing world.

Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG5) deals with improving maternal health, by reducing the maternal mortality ration by three quarters between the year the goals were decided upon, 1990 and 2015. MDG5 is also attempting to achieve universal access to reproductive health by 2015.

The United Nations have pledged to eradicate poverty throughout the world by setting eight international Millennium Development Goals which the 192 member states and 23 international organisations intend to achieve by 2015.

They include eradicating extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS and developing a global partnership for development.

While countries like China and India are coming close to achieving their development goals sub-Saharan Africa still lags far behind. The risk of a woman dying as the result of pregnancy or childbirth during her lifetime is one in 26 compared with one in 11,000 in Western Europe. Although these deaths are majorly preventable MDG5 is the one towards which least progress has been made.