Joyful Motherhood works within the Malawi health care system to address two critical and often unseen care gaps. (1) Home-based care for women after complicated deliveries. (2) Infant nutrition for babies who cannot access breast milk.

Consider this: What happens to the woman who survived a traumatic birth but lost her baby and her uterus in the process? What happens to her when she is discharged home to the village after a month-long hospitalization and is emaciated and too weak to draw water or collect firewood or plant her fields or care for her other young children?

What happens is this: Her family plunges deeper into poverty, food insecurity in her home worsens, she is often depressed and finds it increasingly difficult to care for herself and her children, her children face an increased risk of dying, and she faces an increased risk of dying over the subsequent year.

Consider this: What happens to the healthy term newborn whose mother died from postpartum hemorrhage, who returns to the village in the arms of his grandmother or aunt who survives by subsistence farming and earns less than US$2 per day?  How does a family suffering from food insecurity with no nursing mother purchase a tin of formula for US$6 every couple of days to sustain the baby left behind?  What happens when they can no longer sell their own food or resources to afford one more tin?

What happens is this:  The family do their best to support the survival of the infant, but due to poverty this often means they water down formula or give maize porridge or even juice to quiet the crying infant.  The baby’s health deteriorates and ultimately too many of these infants die.

Joyful Motherhood was founded to care for these women and infants.  We provide family-based care including nutrition support, health assessments, health education for guardians, community mobilization, and small investments for small home business of our clients.  Our approach is individualized with the goal not only of ensuring survival but of developing healthy family homes.