The Riley Mother and Baby Hospital is a state-of-the-art maternity and neonatal facility that not only provides comprehensive care for mothers both before and after delivery, but also trains students and interns who’ll become practicing OB-GYNs. The hospital serves as a referral center for women and infants all across Western Kenya, with 12,000 babies delivered there each year and 100 babies in neonatal care at any given time.

In East African culture, chamas are groups of women who come together to pool resources and receive support. Chamas for Change is a program initiated by AMPATH to connect mothers to other mothers. With the help of Kenyan community health workers, the groups get education on healthcare, as well as access to savings and loan programs. With that help, they can afford healthcare and encourage each other to get it. 

Women and children in poor and rural communities often face the challenges of childhood and parenthood without supportive relationships in the home or community. Malezi Mema (“Parenting Well” in Swahili) is a growing AMPATH initiative that steps in to be that support, teaching parenting skills that improve health and wellbeing for families and reduce some of the stresses parents in Kenya face. 

More than 126,000 women in western Kenya have been screened for cervical cancer by AMPATH programs as of 2021. Working with local health leadership teams, AMPATH has set up screening clinics, developed capacity for advanced treatments like cryotherapy and radical hysterectomy, and trained medical students and nurses who provide diagnostic and curative procedures. And because more than half of women with cervical cancer also have HIV, AMPATH is working to incorporate Human papillomavirus (HPV) testing into HIV treatment visits.

Women’s health, or Obstetrics and Gynecology (OBGYN), is an important field of training within AMPATH. Collaboration between OBGYN faculty from Moi University School of Medicine, University of Toronto, and Indiana University have created and continue to sustain robust OBGYN training programs. This partnership created an OBGYN residency program at Moi, along with specialized fellowship training in gynecologic oncology and maternal fetal medicine.

Across AMPATH clinics, women receive family planning services that are vital to safe motherhood, healthy families and prosperous communities. And we also play a role in community education events around contraceptive counselling and family planning. In the last 3 years, AMPATH helped build a complex family planning contraception clinic, first for women on anti-coagulation that is teratogenic, and now for all reproductive age women with complex medical conditions. We offer contraception free of charge to these women, as the risk of pregnancy is so great.

Without treatment, the chances a pregnant HIV-positive mother will pass the virus to her infant or newborn are 35%. Together, our in-clinic and home-based programs have lowered mother-to-child transmission to 4.2%, practically preventing it in our treatment areas.