Exodus of skilled labour leaves Zimbabwe with a huge midwife shortage

Sixty percent of midwife posts in Zimbabwe's public health institutions are vacant, a top government official said Wednesday.  Deputy Health Minister Douglas Mombeshora said an exodus of skilled professionals which the country experienced in the last ten years, when it was gripped with a long-running economic and political crisis, had left midwifery in shambles.

Millions of Zimbabweans left the country in the last decade for greener pastures in regional and overseas countries to escape the crisis, which only eased last year when a coalition government including the opposition took over.

Most hit by the departures was the under-paying public service, with teachers and health professionals top of the list.

Mombeshora said specialised health services like midwifery lost much of the staff because they were readily in demand, especially in neighbouring countries.

As a result, he said the government had started training Primary Care Nurses (PCN) in midwifery as a way of addressing the huge manpower shortage the country was experiencing.

But he said the scale of the training did not match the huge numbers required, and therefore Zimbabwe will continue to suffer the shortage of midwives for years to come.

'Our midwifery schools do not have the capacity to train midwives at the rate at which they left the country, and we are trying our best by opening more schools as we did at Howard Mission Hospital,' Mombeshora said, referring to a new midwife training centre which was opened recently.

'There is a huge shortage of midwives in the country and to cover the gap, we are now capacitating PCNs with fundamental midwifery proficiency to assist pregnant women. This is not an ideal situation but only a stop gap measure,' he said.

He said another hope for Zimbabwe lay in trying to attract back the midwives who left, but this depended on the current economic recovery and political stability holding.

So far, most of the professionals who left the country have stayed put in their jobs abroad, reluctant to return home where the remuneration is low, particularly in the public service.

On average, Zimbabwean civil servants are paid US$250 a month, far lower than their counterparts in most countries in the region.

'We hope that salary adjustments for civil servants will help lure back professionals for the betterment of the country,' Mombeshora said.

As a result of the midwife shortage, the majority of Zimbabwean women rely on traditional midwives, especially in the rural areas where the bulk of the country's population lives.

But in the era of HIV/AIDS and other communicable diseases, this is not only fraught with dangers, but is also strongly discouraged.