Army of Angels

Afghanistan’s community midwives

- Sophie Ibbotson

In Afghanistan, a woman dies every 27 minutes from pregnancy-related complications. At 6.5 percent (6,500 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births), the maternal mortality rate in Badakhshan Province is the highest in the world. Over the course of her lifetime, an Afghan woman’s chance of dying in childbirth or from pregnancy complications is one in eight, compared to one in 8,000 in the developed world. There is nothing poetic about these deaths; the birth of any child is a miracle, but in Afghanistan, it often comes at too high a price.

With a nominal per-capita GDP of just US$585 (International Monetary Fund, April 2012), Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth. More than three decades of conflict with forces both external and internal have ravaged what infrastructure there was, and the much-advertised influx of foreign aid rarely reaches the people that need it most: the rural poor in Afghanistan’s remote, mountainous regions, as well as women in conservative communities who rarely, if ever, leave their homes and can have no contact with men outside their immediate family.