Edna Hospital of Somaliland

Lynn Sherr has published a new article profiling Edna Adan at the Daily Beast.

Edna Adan with Graduating Nurses

“The biggest gift I want to leave behind is not a building, but the skills I leave with the women. I want to train 1,000 midwives.”

Her progress so far is astounding. Since the hospital opened, they have delivered more than 9,500 women and lost only 39. “That’s 39 too many,” she laments, nonetheless delighted that they have reduced the maternal mortality rate by one-fourth. In 1988, the last time a study was done, there were 160 deaths per 10,000 births in Somaliland, making it the third worst in the world. “Women are dying of complications nobody is picking up,” she explains. “Because nobody is there to support them, care for them, or deliver them. They are getting infected, torn apart. No woman should die of childbirth, because modern obstetrics has ways to save them.” The challenge: “ignorance, poverty, and harmful traditions.”

Those are also the culprits in her other lifelong cause: ending the practice now called Female Genital Mutilation. When she started speaking out–to the embarrassment of her husband-it was simply Female Circumcision. “No one would talk about it then. I was the first Somali woman to pick up a microphone.” And despite all the publicity in recent years she says, “We have not cracked the surface of it. I am giving out a document at the conference showing a new survey of 4.000 women. Of them, 97 percent, shamefully, had been cut. After 34 years of campaigning. We’re nowhere near winning that battle.”

But Edna Adan Ismail takes comfort that now, “we have the whole world talking about it, it’s out of the closet.”

Read the Full Article

Tags: Edna Adan, Female Genital Mutilation, Midwife, Somaliland, Women, Women in the World Summit