Life-saving Infant Feeding Training Liberia/Rwanda

Dear Friends and Supporters,

Firstly, MAITS would like to extend a big Thank You to everyone who has donated to the life-saving infant feeding training in Liberia/Rwanda. This has meant we’ve raised £2,378 so far, moving us ever closer to our goal of £21,689, which would allow us to deliver the infant feeding training in Liberia.

Since our last report, your donations have helped our two MAITS experts to deliver the second stage of the training in Rwanda: lifesaving, urgent training on weaning infants with feeding difficulties at 6-12 months. The training focused on building staff’s skills on weaning, from introducing solid food, right through to helping children with feeding difficulties to eat and drink. They trained a total of 22 healthcare staff and social workers, who will be passing these skills on to their colleagues, alongside working with 12 children and 8 mothers (including 4 Expert Mothers who support new mothers with feeding their children)!

We’ve had great feedback from the trainees! An Expert Mother said, “I’m looking forward to passing on the training in my local village meetings to help even more mothers” and a social worker “I’m happy to learn how to help parents correctly position their child as they feed them.” These simple but vital techniques will help improve the long-term outcomes for children with feeding difficulties, reducing the risk of malnutrition and helping to reduce mortality. All in all, the training was a great success!

As part of their ongoing mentoring, the MAITS experts also met with the 4 master trainers who, since last year, have been rolling the first stage of the infant feeding programme to local colleagues and health care staff. The MAITS experts prepared the master trainers to locally rolling out the second part of the training on infant weaning, which helps to increase the projects’ sustainability. The master trainers also reported back on how the training has been benefiting them through patient case studies and the MAITS trainers supervised clinical practice to provide guidance and support.

Your help in securing more funding would mean that we could duplicate this success by delivering this life-saving training in Liberia, which currently has the 19th highest infant mortality rate in the world. Your donations will help us to train 26 local healthcare professionals on reducing infant feeding difficulties, reaching 415 mothers and babies in the first year, alongside 2 local master trainers, who can roll the programme out, helping to make the project sustainable

If you would like to see these projects save more lives in Rwanda and Liberia, please keep spreading the word about MAITS to your friends, families and colleges. If you’d like to see how your donations have been directly helping in Rwanda and get to know some of the Expert Mothers, go to MAITS 2018/19 annual report at https://www.maits.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/19Annual-Report.v11.pdf and turn to pages 18, 19 and 20 to find out more. You can also keep up to date with our work on our social media: https://www.facebook.com/MAITS.Charity and https://twitter.com/Maits_Charity. 

 Best wishes, 

Esther Hamilton, 

CEO

Links:

• Pages 18-20 for more on the project: MAITS 2018-19 Annual Report
• Follow us on Facebook for more updates

Dear Friends and Supporters,

MAITS would like to extend a warm thanks to all those who have generously donated to MAITS’ Life-saving Infant Feeding Training Liberia/Rwanda project. With your help, we have now managed to raise £2,370, which gets us ever closer to our goal of £21,689. Reaching this goal will allow us not only to deliver the infant feeding training in Liberia, which is the first stage of the training, but also follow up this training in Rwanda where it was successfully piloted with the second stage, the infant weaning training.

Since our last report, we have managed to arrange a small amount of top up training in Rwanda to help with the issues around weaning because this was urgent. The amount we have managed to arrange so far will go towards that training taking place. We have booked flights for our two MAITS experts to travel to Rwanda in September to deliver this.

Winning additional funding would also enable us to run the first stage, the infant feeding training, in Liberia. This training is low cost and incredibly effective in reducing the infant mortality rates by supporting women in feeding their infants in the first few vitals months of motherhood.  The successful pilot has in Rwanda has reached 4,400 mothers and babies since February 2018. We aim to duplicate this success in Liberia, which currently has the 19^th highest infant mortality rate in the world. By training 26 local healthcare professionals, we would reach 415 mothers and babies to support them through their first year of breastfeeding & weaning. The project will also train 2 local master trainers who can roll out the programme on an ongoing basis with continued clinical supervision by MAITS trainers, making this project sustainable.

We hope that with your continued support we will be able to see these projects save more lives in Rwanda and Liberia. If you would like to see this too, please spread the word about MAITS’ work to your friends, families and colleges

Best wishes,

Esther Hamilton