CAIRO: The United States last Thursday graduated 31 women from across Afghanistan from a training program for practicing midwives in Alexandria. The program was funded by the Health Services Support Project and was implemented by the USAID Afghanistan program. The two-week training started on October 10 and focused on the development of knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to provide care to women throughout their childbearing cycle with the “ultimate goal of ensuring and achieving safe motherhood,” a statement from the US Embassy in Cairo said. The participants were trained on a variety of topics related to safe motherhood including, performing physical assessment, performing antenatal history, identifying health risk factors during pregnancy, applying basic principles of health education and counseling, providing nursing care during labor and delivery, providing care if post-partum complications occur and providing care to the newborn. “Egypt should be lauded as it has achieved its Millennium Development Goal Number 4 of reducing the under-five mortality rate by two thirds between 1990 and 2015 and it is approaching the achievement of MDG 5 in reducing the maternal mortality ratio by three quarters between 1990 and 2015,” said USAID director in Egypt James Bever. “Egypt is now leveraging those achievements by hosting training programs like these where our Egyptian counterparts can share valuable lessons learned and effective practices with health practitioners from Afghanistan to improve health not only in Egypt, but around the world.” “The maternal mortality ratio in Afghanistan is the second highest in the world. Every 27 minutes a mother dies, and 77 percent of maternal deaths are due to avoidable factors. The neonatal mortality ratio is also high with 60 newborns out of every 1,000 dying in the first month of life,” the statement from the embassy said earlier this year during an initial training period in April. BM