Our Projects
The mission of the AMF Foundation is to support short-term, mid-term and long-term goals with the aim of improving maternal mortality outcomes for women and girls in Sierra Leone.
Currently, through the Freedom From Fistula Foundation (FFFF), AMF is supporting Aberdeen Women’s Centre in Freetown, Sierra Leone. This support allows those women with the greatest need to have fistula surgery to restore both their health and dignity. Additionally, we support the ‘Dream Team’ project, which offers young women and girls, who became pregnant during the Ebola crisis, pre and post-natal support and birthing in the Aberdeen Women’s Centre maternity centre.
THE DREAM TEAM
The AMF will also work with pregnant women and girls, looking for practical and appropriate ways to improve maternal and infant health outcomes and how to better care for themselves and their children. Over the long-term, AMF hopes to expand its operation into rural areas where maternal healthcare is limited.
Training Hostel
There are very few facilities in rural areas in Sierra Leone where women can safely give birth and receive through pre and postnatal care. The Aberdeen Women’s Centre has secured and refurbished a house to become a hostel that will provide much more than free accommodation, but a safe environment where the women can gain more skills training to ensure a sustainable future for them.
The Aberdeen Women’s Centre plans to train residents of the hostel as ‘house girls’ and run a social enterprise business employing the women, providing security and safety. Our new mothers and their babies will be cared for, helped back to school, given employment training and helped to find safe jobs.
PREVENTING AND CURING FISTULA
Obstetric fistula most commonly occurs among women who live in low-resource countries, who give birth without access to medical help. If a woman’s labor becomes obstructed, she could remain in excruciating pain for days before her baby is finally dislodged. Her baby likely dies and she is often left with an obstetric fistula, a small hole created by constant pressure from the fetus, which renders her incontinent.
Our Foundation works closely with the Aberdeen Women's Centre that takes a holistic approach to the care of women and children and in 2010 opened its own maternity unit to provide the highest standards of maternal healthcare for the women of Sierra Leone, thus preventing the occurrence of obstetric fistula in the first instance and ensuring a safe environment for childbirth.
