Edna Hospital of Somaliland

February 6 is the International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting and a panel was convened by Nicholas Kristof at the conference last week in Davos, Switzerland to discuss the issue:

An estimated 120 to 140 million women have been subject to this harmful and dangerous practice and 3 million girls continue to be at risk each year. The practice persists because it is sustained by social perceptions, including that girls and their families will face shame, social exclusion and diminished marriage prospects if they forego cutting. These perceptions can, and must, change.

FGM/C poses immediate and long-term consequences for the health of women and girls, and violates their human rights. More Information

You can watch a video at YouTube where Edna Adan discusses FGM with Voice of America.

Tags: Female Genital Mutilation, Nicholas Kristof, Women

In this review of Half the Sky in the NY Review of Books, Sue Halpern discusses the plight of women in the developing world.

Read Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof

For Westerners, the words “gender inequality” are likely to suggest pay differentials and glass ceilings and old-boy networks. For the women and girls Kristof and WuDunn write about, gender inequality is more elemental. It takes the form of sexual slavery and other kinds of bondage; rape and other kinds of physical and mental assaults; and the withholding of medicine, food, and other privations; and it issues from a belief so fixed as to be unimpeachable: women are less human than men. (Not that they are less worthy, but that they are, fundamentally, less human.)

Using examples from the book, Halpern shows that how it really is possible to turn “turn oppression into opportunity.”

It is now pretty much taken for granted that educating girls has an ameliorating effect on almost every social indicator, most especially family income and family size, and that this in turn reduces the violence that stems from resource wars. An education doesn’t necessarily mean book-learning, either: one of the stipulations made by Edna Adan when she was building her hospital was that the brickmakers teach women their trade. Somaliland now has its first women brickmakers; those women now have a marketable skill. As Muhammad Yunus and his colleagues at Grameen have demonstrated, enabling women to enter the workforce itself leads to more education and the spread of literacy. It’s the opposite of a vicious circle.

Edna highly recommends the full article.

Tags: In the News, Nicholas Kristof, Women

Edna Maternity Hospital

We would like to thank the “Friends of Edna Hospital Society in Vancouver” for a generous donation of US$1800 they have sent to the Edna Adan Hospital as well as another amount of US$850 they have sent to the Las Anood Hospital through us with instructions that we buy medical supplies for that hospital.

The money was brought to us by Mr. Rashid Ayanshe Ibrahim, who is the Chairman of the Friends of Edna Hospital Society in Vancouver which is a group formed by Somalis living in the Diaspora. This is the first time that a group of Somalis have mobilised themselves on their own to raise funds for our hospitals.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who took the trouble to raise awareness about the needs of our people, and all those who donated funds to support our hospitals. We will be taking pictures of the supplies we buy for the Las Anood Hospital when the package is put together.

Tags: Edna Adan

A writer at the Huffington Post has suggested that Nicolas Kristof’s book Half the Sky should be considered the most important book of the decade. Steve Leveen writes:

But what if we could have known in 1962, the year of its publication, that Silent Spring would contain a message of change necessary to save our very world? My guess is that we would have acted faster to head off what we’re desperately trying to fix today.

So it’s important to try to fathom which books will become the most influential books of our time, in order to add force to their nascent power. In this hazardous task, I hazard a prediction: the most influential book of the decade will be Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

…The oppression of women is breathtakingly evil, it’s frighteningly pervasive in the developing world, and it is alarmingly consequential in its damage–those messages come across vividly in the able hands of authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

The Edna Adan Hospital has its own chapter in this book. Highly recommended reading!

Tags: In the News, Nicholas Kristof, Women

Edna Adan was at the University of Pretoria this past Thursday to accept the Chancellor’s Medal for her outstanding contribution to humanity, and particularly with regard to helping the under-privileged people of Somaliland to realize their right to health.

Here is the original article by Saeed Mohamed

Dr. Edna Adan spoke at the university’s graduation ceremonies on International Human Rights Day and to celebrate law students from 20 countries who had just completed a Master of Laws (LLM) in Human Rights and Democratization in Africa.

Mr. Martin Nsibirwa, University of Pretoria’s LLM Programme Manager, introduced Edna Adan to the audience saying, “Edna Adan Maternity Hospital is the best hospital in Africa.”

The theme of Dr. Edna’s keynote address was “Promoting Human Rights in Somaliland and Africa in general.”

Edna Adan receives the Chancellor's Medal at the University of Pretoria

The recognition that Centre for Human right at the University of Pretoria is bestowing upon me belongs to all who speak out for the voiceless and will hopefully encourage those who are concerned about human rights but who keep silent out of fear of repercussions. Perhaps we should learn from the tortoise whose motto is ‘You cannot make progress unless you stick your neck out but with due caution.’

Today, with profound humility, and knowing full well that there are many who are far more deserving than I am, I accept this award on behalf of those individuals and groups both in Somaliland and elsewhere who have taken great personal risk to ensure that others may live in peace and dignity. This includes the quarter million war genocide victims in Somaliland who gave their lives to fight oppression during our civil war from 1982 to 1991. I wish to reconise them as the martyrs who praved the way for the peace, freedom and stability that we (Somalilanders) enjoy today.

Dr. Edna further emphasized in her moving speech about the importance of empowering women both in Somaliland and Africa in general.

I accept this award on behalf of the women of Somaliland and Africa who have the highest maternal mortality rate in the world and who die because they are poor. Our women die because they lack care from well trained health care providers in health facilities that are properly equipped. Our women also die because the lack the education that would have raised their status and given them access to skills and employment” Dr. Edna attaches her caring emotions; she further highlights that women die because of female genital cutting.

I know there is no magic wand that can resolve all our problems but I am confident that if we join hands and concentrate on just one effort which is that of training more midwives in our community, we will prevent the death of many women and children. I therefore appeal for support in this major undertaking which my hospital (Edna Adan Maternity Hospital, Hargeisa Somaliland) is pioneering in Somaliland and where such training is in progress right now.

The University of Pretoria’s Centre for Human Rights, which was awarded the 2006 UNESCO Prize for Human Rights Education, presents the one-year full-time LLM in partnership with eight other universities in Africa representing all the sub-regions. The students were drawn from a variety of backgrounds, including the civil service, the judiciary, academia, and some recent graduates.

Since its inception in 2000, 291 students from 35 African countries including Somaliland, have graduated from the programme, and gone back to their respective countries to hold various positions in government, academia, and the NGO sector.

Tags: Edna Adan, Female Genital Mutilation, Human Rights, In the News, Women

Here is a photo of Bill Clinton meeting Edna Adan at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City.

Both of these images can be seen larger, just click them. Many more photos can be seen in the Edna Hospital Gallery.

Tags: Clinton Global Initiative, Edna Adan

Edna Hospital was 7 years old in March 2009.

Tags: Clinton Global Initiative, Hospital News

Read Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof

Watch Nicholas Kristof on Oprah October 1

This Oprah program is tentatively scheduled for broadcast on Thursday, October 1.

Tags: In the News, Nicholas Kristof, Oprah, Women

The Clinton Global Initiative web site has made available video of the entire panel discussion PLENARY SESSION: INVESTING IN GIRLS AND WOMEN. Just click on the link and then click on WATCH NOW link near the photo of Edna Adan.

Video of Edna Adan at CGI

At a time when the world finds itself on an unsustainable course, facing an increasing number of complex challenges for which traditional approaches are no longer sufficient, innovation stands as a key to addressing many of the issues confronting us today. During this session, experts in the field will discuss the importance of innovation as a vehicle for building a sustainable future. Where does innovation begin? What should be the role of government in promoting and facilitating innovation? Which countries are leading the charge, and how do you best position yourself and your organization to take advantage? This panel will provide a broad introduction to innovation, various approaches to cultivate it, and implications for those who pursue it and those who don’t.

You are able to skip ahead – Edna is introduced at about the 37-minute mark:

Edna gives a real nice little speech about determination in difficult circumstances at about the 1:02 mark.
At 1:16 she begins discussing the causes of high rates of maternal mortality, leading into an assertion that the most important thing anybody can do to show support for women is to support greater educational opportunities.
At 1:24 Edna speaks about how Somaliland’s success is representative of what a people can do with limited resources if they have sufficient resolve to improve their circumstances.

Tags: Clinton Global Initiative, Edna Adan, Somaliland, Video, Women

The Clinton Global Initiative, meeting in New York City, has issued the following press release:

Corporations, NGOs, and Foundations Announce 13 New Commitments to Empower Girls and Women at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative

Edna Adan is seen here at the right

New York, NY – Millions of girls and women will have access to improved health care, better education, and increased economic opportunity because of commitments made today at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), which brings together leaders from across sectors of society to identify solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, and produce 50 percent of the food, yet earn only 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property,” President Bill Clinton said. “Whether the issue is improving education in the developing world, or fighting global climate change, or addressing nearly any other challenge we face, empowering women is a critical part of the equation.”

Edna Adan said illiteracy has helped to keep women down

Reports show that when women and girls are empowered, entire regions see measurable results. This is especially true for economic empowerment – for example, a woman is likely to reinvest about 90 percent of her earnings into her family’s well-being, compared with 35 percent for a man. Increases in access to education among girls accounted for a decline of 43 percent in the malnutrition rates between 1970 and 1995. Investing in women’s health, especially reproductive health, not only saves the lives of half a million mothers, but also unleashes an estimated $15 billion in productivity each year….

This year, the CGI Annual Meeting will feature a variety of special programming related to girls and women. Today, the plenary session “Investing in Girls and Women,” moderated by Diane Sawyer, featured Edna Adan, director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital; Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and CEO of The Goldman Sachs Group; Zainab Salbi, founder and CEO of Women for Women International; Rex Tillerson, Chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil, Melanne Verveer, ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues at the U.S. Department of State; and Robert B. Zoellick, President of The World Bank Group.

Read the entire press release here.

Edna Adan said women are dying in childbirth because nobody cares... People think she's dying because she was meant to die.

Feministing has high praise for Edna Adan about the conference:

Edna Adan, Director and Founder, Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital, was also an amazing speaker. She focused on the importance of skilled birth attendants in [Somaliland]. “Reproductive health is affected by nutrition, is affected by age at which she is married, so many other factors.” She said women are dying in childbirth, “because nobody cares… [People think] she’s dying because she was meant to die. She was not meant to die. She could be safe.” “The decision of whether she has treatment must be left to the woman. often its a husband or a brother or a father who decides whether she will be taken to the hospital or not.” There is a view that the husband owns the unborn child and therefore the decision is his, which must be countered through education.

Adan said these issues are not just women’s issues and that we need to engage men: “It is demanding men stand up and recognize women belong on this earth.”

Bill Clinton said Women perform 66 percent of the world's work, and produce 50 percent of the food, yet earn only 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property.

The Daily Beast, in an article Global Power Gals reports,

Edna said women need the gift of knowledge

“Edna Adan, founder of a hospital in her native [Somaliland] bearing her name now (and the first woman to drive there!), said the single most important gift was “the gift of knowledge,” to wipe out the illiteracy that has kept women down for so long. Her own rise in a country that has not long appreciated women’s value was the result, she said, of “determinedness and hard-headedness.”
“These women are dying silent deaths,” said Edna Adan, the midwife, who said she was shocked when, after 50 years of work, she treated a woman in [Somaliland] bearing her 21st child. The audience gasped.

Reuters reports, “Edna Adan Ismail, a women’s rights activist from [Somaliland] who founded a maternity hospital there, said her most pressing near-term needs include water for hand-washing, mid-wife training and medical equipment.

“There are so many things, but if we prioritize them, I would say education, education and yet more education,” Ismail said.

Tags: Clinton Global Initiative, Edna Adan, Women

Edna Adan is visiting New York this week, where she will participate in a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative.

What: Plenary Session: Investing in Girls and Women
Date: Sept. 23, 2009
Time: 9:00 – 10:30 AM

Every problem in the world is exacerbated by gender inequality. Even though women make up 50 percent of the world’s population, girls and women continuously lack the same access as men to education, health care, jobs, and the political arena. Yet each year of schooling increases a woman’s income by 10 to 20 percent, and closing the gender gap adds 0.5 percent to a country’s per capita GNP. Smart businesses appreciate that increased support for girls and women is integral to fostering successful markets for the future. Innovative programs are already producing remarkable results, and far-seeing countries and organizations are finding that reaching out to girls and women deepens confidence, creates opportunity, and raises profits. This panel will examine a few notable success stories.

Participants:
Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and CEO, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
Zainab Salbi, Founder and CEO, Women for Women International
Diane Sawyer, Co-Anchor, Good Morning America; Co-Anchor, Primetime
Rex W. Tillerson, Chief Executive Officer, ExxonMobil Corporation
Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Women’s Issues, Office of the Secretary, U.S. State Department
Robert Zoellick, President, The World Bank Group

Tags: Clinton Global Initiative, Edna Adan, Women

Pullitzer Prize winner and NY Times columnist Nicolas Kristof has taped a full hour program with Oprah where he discusses his new book, Half the Sky, which prominently features Edna Adan. We don’t yet know the exact date that the show will be broadcast but is expected to be shown in early October. Watch for it!

The book, and the TV show, profile heroic women in the developing world and also discuss the important – essential – role of women in a country’s development. Nicolas said the program was so moving that one of Oprah’s security guards was brought to tears.

You can keep up with all of his news at his Twitter page: http://twitter.com/nytimeskristof

Tags: In the News, Nicholas Kristof, Oprah, Women

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn will publish their new book in September, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. That book is previewed in the NY Times Sunday magazine issue of August 23, 2009 and it can be read online here: The Womens Crusade. Edna Adan is featured in the article. Here is an excerpt:

An obstetric fistula, which is a hole created inside the body by a difficult childbirth, leaves a woman incontinent, smelly, often crippled and shunned by her village — yet it can be repaired for a few hundred dollars. Dr. Lewis Wall, president of the Worldwide Fistula Fund, and Michael Horowitz, a conservative agitator on humanitarian issues, have drafted the 12-year plan — and it’s eminently practical and built on proven methods. Evidence that fistulas can be prevented or repaired comes from impoverished Somaliland, a northern enclave of Somalia, where an extraordinary nurse-midwife named Edna Adan has built her own maternity hospital to save the lives of the women around her. A former first lady of Somalia and World Health Organization official, Adan used her savings to build the hospital, which is supported by a group of admirers in the U.S. who call themselves Friends of Edna Maternity Hospital.

Read more at the blog On the Ground and at the web site created especially for the book, Half the Sky Movement.

Also, there’s this brief article: Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid:

Find a cause that resonates with you, learn more about it and adopt it. For example, we send checks to support an extraordinary Somali woman, Edna Adan (see above), who has invested her savings and her soul in her own maternity hospital in Somaliland (ednahospital.org).

Finally, Edna is featured some more in this audio slide show, narrated personally by Kristof, about courageous women in the developing world: A Powerful Truth.

Tags: Nicholas Kristof, NY Times, Women

Somaliland: What Somalia Could Be is a new article written by Dr. J. Peter Pham recounting some of the history of both Somaliland and Somalia. Dr. Pham speaks highly of Edna Adan and of the hospital as an example of the good things that can happen in the presence of good governance. He discusses at length just how good government in Africa can come about. (And why it has failed to come about in Somalia – once again the World’s #1 Most Failed State )

Meanwhile, civil society, so devastated in the rest of the Somali lands, has made tremendous strides in Somaliland, carving out a space for private civic and charitable engagement. To cite just one example, the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Hargeisa, founded in 2002 by Edna Adan Ismail, the former foreign minister of Somaliland (2003-2006) who donated her pension from the World Health Organization as well as other personal assets to it, provides a higher standard of care than available anywhere else in the Somali lands for maternity and infant conditions as well as diagnosis and treatment for HIV/AIDS and sexually-transmitted diseases and general medical treatments. In addition, the hospital serves as a teaching hospital, training an entire generation of nurses and midwives qualified to provide reproductive healthcare throughout the country and serving as a medical research center, with a special attention paid to the health problems associated with female genital mutilation.

On the specific question of recognition of Somaliland independence, Dr. Pham quotes from a report by the African Union.

The official report of an AU fact-finding mission to the republic in 2005 led by AU Deputy Chairperson Patrick Mazimhaka concluded: “The fact that the union between Somaliland and Somalia was never ratified and also malfunctioned when it went into action from 1960 to 1990, makes Somaliland’s search for recognition historically unique and self-justified in African political history. Objectively viewed, the case should not be linked to the notion of ‘opening a Pandora’s Box’. As such, the AU should find a special method of dealing with this outstanding case.”

Full article: Somaliland: What Somalia Could Be

Tags: AIDS, Horn of Africa, In the News, Somaliland

Here is the transcript of the forthcoming video where Edna Adan appeals to the world to get help for a young woman whose face was destroyed when she was shot – shot in the face when she was only two years old!

I would like to speak to you about the case of Ayaan Osman, a child who was shot in the face when she was two years old during the Somali Civil War that Somaliland had with Somalia in 1988.

At the time of her injury, Ayaan was taken to a refugee camp where fortunately she was given the medical care that saved her life. Today, Ayaan is a young woman who has taught herself to read and write, not only in Somali but also in English. Unfortunately, Ayaan has a gap in her face. Ayaan has a hole on the side of her face, with a tooth sticking out here and a hole from where food and liquid, as she drinks, pours out from. Ayaan is from Burao and has come to our hospital in Hargeisa to seek help.

I was very touched by her case. We get many patients whom we can save. And we also have some patients that we cannot, and we move on. but the case of Ayaan has left a lot of pain in me because I often wonder where I would be if had been the one who had sustained those injuries that Ayaan did when she was two years old. I feel very touched when I see her eat and drink and have to deal with the liquid that is pouring out. I don’t know how she does it.

She has lived for 20 years with that condition. And because God has given me a voice and has given me the ability to reach out to the world, that is why I am appealing to the world out there for the medical assistance and the facial reconstruction that Ayaan needs in order to lead a normal life like everybody else does.

I appeal for plastic surgery. I appeal for facial reconstruction for Ayaan and I thank you all for your attention. - Edna Adan Ismail

For more information – including how you can make a donation – please see the web site we have created for Ayaan at www.HelpAyaan.org

Please be advised, the photos will be difficult for you to look at.

Tags: Ayaan, Children, Women, You Can Help