Fighting a health battle
MSAWAWA - A satellite clinic of Witkoppen Health and Welfare Centre is single-handedly fighting for maternal and child health in the informal settlement of Msawawa.
The satellite clinic occupies a tiny, corrugated iron structure on a patch of bare land at the very edge of the settlement.
Beyond the wire fence on one side lie the agricultural holdings that characterise the area – privately owned and informally occupied over the past decade – on the other, the dirt roads and shacks of the settlement stretch out of sight.
The clinic, Msawawa’s only healthcare facility, focuses on the well-being of mothers and their children – a basic healthcare requirement that remains an enormous challenge in South Africa and across the subcontinent.
The African Union has dedicated the decade between 2010 and 2020 to empower women, including a focus on healthcare improvements and reduction of maternal and child mortality rates. Yet Sub-Saharan Africa’s maternal mortality rates remain the world’s worst, and thousands of women and children die from childbirth complications yearly.
The Msawawa clinic does its small part to address their plight through programmes aimed at improving the health of women and children in the informal settlement. Gathering outside the clinic, which is too small to hold the sizeable group, mothers receive weekly childcare education lessons from the clinic’s Grace Mothibinyane and Noluyolo Gosa, with a focus on child health and welfare. The rest of the week is filled with weekly home visits to those who are too ill to visit the clinic, rounds by a mobile clinic, and gardening days to teach skills and strengthen community identity.
The clinic’s work in the Msawawa community is part of targeted efforts by the Witkoppen Health and Welfare Centre to bring basic healthcare to residents of Johannesburg’s informal settlements. In the face of poverty, high HIV infection rates, and non-existent medical facilities in a population of millions, however, the task is unimaginably huge. The reach of one small satellite clinic, with its focus firmly on new mothers and their children, is severely limited, and the need for medical help in this and other informal settlements remains desperate.
