Meet Muzalema Mwanza, a mother and civil engineer who is combating the high rates of maternal and infant mortality in Zambia with a simple, low-cost delivery kit that gives pregnant women access to a clean and safe delivery for their newborns.
Muzalema has always been passionate about social entrepreneurship. As an engineer she ran her own construction company, worked on an innovative women’s fish farm and mentored high school girls on STEM projects. However, it wasn’t until her first pregnancy in 2017 that Muzalema experienced the challenges facing pregnant women in rural Zambia where maternal fatalities are 50 times higher than the global average.
Due to a critical shortage of medical supplies, women must bring their own birthing materials, like sterile gloves and surgical blades, to hospital or risk being turned away. When it took Muzalema 10 separate shopping trips to collect her list of mandatory items she realised it was the high cost and low availability of these items that forced many mothers to give birth at home, often with unskilled birth attendants and unsterilized equipment.
At 36 weeks pregnant, she used her engineering background to develop a prototype of a cheap, disposable birthing kit, which she used during her own childbirth and established the Safe Motherhood Alliance. Using low-cost technology and local materials, Muzalema created a delivery kit that had the essential components recommended by the World Health Organization to reduce risk of infection at the cost of US$10 per unit. In partnership with the Department of Health, Muzalema has now distributed her birth kits to 3,500 health clinics across Zambia.
