May 4, 2000 | Read Time: 1 minute
An online campaign developed by the editors of Time magazine is raising money to create safer, more-sanitary conditions for women giving birth in Rwanda.
Time started the Mother and Baby Survival Project — administered by NetAid.org, the International Rescue Committee, and the Rwandan Ministry of Health — in conjunction with a story it ran last month about the mortality rates associated with childbirth in Rwanda. According to the World Health Organization, one in nine mothers dies during childbirth and 65 out of every 1,000 infants die before their first birthday.
The Time story, an accompanying segment on CNN, and both news organizations’ Web sites featured the Internet address for the Mother and Baby Survival Project section of the NetAid.org Web site.
On the site’s donation page, which looks like a shopping site, visitors can buy a birthing kit designed to make home deliveries safer. Each kit, which costs $8, includes basic sanitary items, such as soap, gloves, and clean cloths, for a mother, her newborn, and an attendant.
The International Rescue Committee hopes that the project will eventually become self-sustaining, and is charging Rwandan women the equivalent of 75 cents for each kit to build a local source of funds.
Donors can also select more expensive birthing kits, which include equipment, supplies, and medicine for community health centers.
The site keeps a running tally of contributions that have been made to the project. In the first two and a half weeks the site was up, visitors contributed more than $160,000.
To get there: Go to http://app.netaid.org/SurvivalProject.
