Amina: Making Childbirth Safe

AMINA • MALAWI

When Amina finally arrived at her grandfather’s home, she had been through nearly unimaginable upheaval and grief. At age eleven she’d lost her mother, then a year later, her father. She tried living with her sister hoping she could stay in school, but the girls couldn’t make ends meet and she had to drop out.

Amina went to work on a neighboring farm for pennies a day. Many of the young women she met there weren’t in school but had married young and would never see the inside of a classroom again.

Amina’s elderly, impoverished grandfather intervened. He saw she was gifted and he knew that if she could only get an education it would sustain her for the rest of her life.

ON THE RISE

He was able to get Amina to our partner in Malawi and she began school. Amina had enough to eat, a bed of her own, and access to the resources she needed to realize the potential she had.

Check out our partner in Malawi to see where Amina lived.

Just as her grandfather predicted, Amina rose to the top of her class. With the consistency of a safe, happy place to live, she was able to focus on her studies. Amina excelled. She won a place at one of the top girls’ boarding schools in Malawi on academic merit and continued to flourish.

Both Amina’s and her grandfather’s dreams have come true. Today she is enrolled in nursing school so that she can become a midwife. Childbirth in Malawi is dangerous for women; mothers lose their children and children lose their mothers. Amina wants to help make it safer.