Feature: Laos making headway in reducing maternal mortality

The death of a mother as a result of complications during child delivery is a tragedy that not only affects the woman and her family but also her community and the nation.

But thanks to modern medical science and practices, the prevalence of maternal deaths has been on the decline across most of the world.

Since 1990, the world has seen a 45 percent decline in maternal mortality, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), something that the organization's own website quite aptly describes as" awesome achievement."

Yet while significant progress on survival rate of birthing mothers has been achieved globally, still there are deaths associated with giving birth among women in less developed countries.

The UNFPA reveals that almost 800 women still die every day worldwide from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, which is equivalent to one woman every two minutes.

Poverty, inaccessibility and minority status are among the factors responsible for the high rates of maternal death, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

But in Laos, a developing country, health authorities have said that they are now almost on target in their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set more than a decade and a half ago, including a reduced maternal mortality.

A nation with a population of less than 7 million that borders China and four relatively populous fellow Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states namely, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, the landlocked Laos has a mountainous interior which is home to a rich patchwork of ethno-linguistic minorities.

In a statement, Lao health authorities said that they are convinced that 2015 will be the year when the country can achieve a milestone in reduction of maternal deaths to less than 185 per 100,000 live births, representing a three-quarter decrease on 1990 levels of maternal mortality.

The statement was issued earlier this week by the nation's Ministry of Health authorities and published in the state-run media, including English-language daily, the Vientiane Times.

To achieve this goal, the country's policymakers is also putting increased funding of a scheme to provide deliveries in hospital to birthing mothers from poorer districts for free, a decision that was announced in the same publication Wednesday, with a cost of some 28 billion Lao Kip (about 3.4 million U.S. dollars).

Among the targets enshrined in the UN-supported MDGs, agreed to by policymakers in developing states in 2000, was the call for a three-quarter reduction of deaths among birthing women by 2015.

In 1995, some 796 per 100,000 women in Laos died as a result of complications during pregnancy and child birth.

In 2015, the maternal mortality rate went down to 185 per 100, 000, even lower than the 220 per 100,000 recorded in 2013. "It's a huge progress on this front and is being welcomed by locally-placed experts," said UNICEF Country Representative in Lao People's Democratic Republic Ms Hongwei Gao.

When compared to its more developed neighbors, Laos has still a long way to go to further reduce maternal mortality.

For example, China, which is still a developing country, has reduced its maternal mortality rate (MMR) from 88.8 per 100,000 in 1990 to some 23.2 per 100,000 in 2013, according to figures from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

In Norway, only four maternal deaths per 100,000 live births were recorded in 2013. Norway is on top of the country rankings of the UNDP Human Development Index.

Laos, which is ranked 139th in the UNDP index, is still facing a lot challenges.

Despite ongoing developments, including hydro-electric power and increasing industrialization, many of the country's remote ethnic villages continue to depend on subsistence agriculture. There are also still many villages that are inaccessible to government health services.

Complicating matters are the vast tracts of otherwise verdant land that remain pockmarked with unexploded ordnance (UXO) left over from U.S. bombing sorties during the Indochinese War and the clandestine operations in Laos conducted during the Vietnam War. Endi