This blog post was contributed by Zubaida Bai, one of the fifteen Young Champions of Maternal Health chosen by Ashoka and the Maternal Health Task Force at EngenderHealth. She will be blogging about her experience every month, and you can learn more about her, the other Young Champions, and the program here.
March 2011 was a month of training and education of all stakeholders. AYZH is adopting a philosophy of going bottom up in terms of creating awareness and education around safe and sterile birthing process. To achieve this, a training manual was created in 4 languages (English, Haitian, Creole and Kannada). A snapshot of the training manual is below. A downloadable version of the manual (in 4 languages) will be available on the AYZH website shortly. I take this opportunity to reach out to all my readers and ask them if they can help AYZH translate the manual in languages they know so the knowledge can be shared with women worldwide. Please email me (zubaida at ayzh dot com) for a copy of the manual. Under the same program, AYZH trained health workers from over 20 clinics in rural Karnataka, India during March 2011.
Tracing back to September when this fellowship began… it seems like yesterday. The universe created by Ashoka and the Maternal Health Task Force around me has definitely helped me in terms of making things happen over the past months. I have been traveling like crazy, meeting people in New York, DC, and LA to support me in taking AYZH forward.
I am so touched and overwhelmed with the support and the possibilities I am seeing with AYZH. Yet I should not be carried away… though I am going after all the connections I am making in full steam… April 2011 is probably going to be the busiest of the months in terms of networking and traveling. For starters:
- AYZH is displaying its poster at the World Health Care Congress, April 4-6, 2011.
- As a TED fellow, I am receiving guidance and coaching from Industry experts, April 7-11, 2011
- I am speaking at the Unite for Sight Global health Conference, Yale University, April 16-17, 2011
- Finally, I am going to Ghana for the Young Champions Future Forum, May 2 – 4, 2011
So stay tuned… exciting things are around the corner…