Build a hospital, change the world
Meet Edna Adan Ismail, an 84 year old midwife, activist and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital in Hargeisa, Somaliland, who has spent her life fighting for women’s health, and to end the practice of female genital mutilation.
Edna’s father was a doctor. He taught her to wash forceps, make bandages out of old hospital bedsheets and instilled the belief that every human being deserves to be taken care of. Although it was unheard of to educate girls, Edna’s father arranged for her to learn how to read and write with a group of local boys and she continued her education at a mission school.
When she was eight years old, Edna’s mother and grandmother arranged for her to be circumcised while her father was away on a business trip. It was a deeply traumatic experience that angered her father and fuelled Edna’s drive to end FGM. Edna was awarded a scholarship in the UK, where she trained as a nurse and midwife for seven years. It was here she met her first husband, who became President of Somaliland in 1993. Despite her position as ‘First Lady’, Edna continued working two days a week in the local hospital, with a dream of one day opening her own.
In 2002, after 15 years of working for the UN and the WHO, Edna returned to Hargeisa to open her hospital, which was built on the site of a former rubbish dump. Edna funded the operations with her pension and sold her jewellery to buy the first basins and toilets. While she was building the hospital, Edna also helped rebuild her war-torn country, serving as Somaliland’s first foreign minister and liked to point out she was “the only foreign minister in the world to have delivered triplets while still in office.”
In 2011, the hospital started training doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and midwives and today, Somaliland has the highest per capita number of trained midwives in Africa. At Edna’s insistence, no student can enrol in the training program without agreeing to work towards ending FGM, and she remains a fierce advocate for women’s rights.
"The world needs to know what can be achieved when women are given a chance to become educated and to build, to save and contribute to this world."
