By ESTHER HAMILTON | CEO
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
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