Just like in every country around the world, the health of Timorese children is directly connected to the wellbeing of their mother. From the very first stages of pregnancy throughout childhood, mothers are often the first point of call in nurturing, protecting, and guiding their children through critical stages of development. This privilege and responsibility is made much more achievable when communities work together to give mothers the support they need for this crucial life season.
Strengthening maternal care and providing ongoing support throughout early motherhood is a key priority for Maluk Timor, serving as one of the most powerful tools we have to improve long-term health outcomes across Timor-Leste’s vulnerable communities. Here’s how we’re working to strengthen care in Timor-Leste.
The importance of a child’s early years
The importance of high-quality support and healthcare during the first few years of a child’s life can’t be overstated. This is a time of extreme growth and vulnerability, during which proper nutrition and healthcare can lay the foundation for a higher quality of health over their lifetime.
In Timor-Leste, this is a period when many mothers face complex challenges. Geographical isolation, limited access to healthcare services, and gaps in critical newborn and early childhood healthcare education can all contribute to problems in Timorese mothers being able to provide their children with this integral care.
Both mothers and children are at greater risk of long-term complications when they’re not supported with consistent antenatal care and postnatal guidance. These complications and health risks can include:
- Malnutrition
- Preventable illnesses
- Developmental delays
Without adequate support, the ongoing impact of these risks can last a lifetime.
The barriers faced by Timor-Leste’s mothers – and how we’re overcoming them
For many women in Timor-Leste, accessing healthcare throughout their pregnancy is a complex and prohibitive experience. With many communities based in rural and remote areas, overcoming long travel distances across varying terrain (with limited transport options) can make it difficult to reach even basic healthcare.
That’s where Maluk Timor’s mobile outreach clinics can make a monumental difference. Our staff work with local community healthcare workers to build the skills needed to provide respectful and comprehensive maternity care, bringing this crucial care to women in these rural and remote villages.
We’re also supporting this foundational care with child malnutrition assessment, counselling and follow-up services. Through this work, women and older children are able to receive malnutrition screenings. When malnutrition is identified, mothers receive access to critical nutritional information and counselling, as well as ongoing follow-up to ensure support for recovery and a healthier future.
This work wouldn’t be possible without our PSFs – Promotor Saude Familiar, who are healthcare workers elected from within their communities to create links to national healthcare facilities.
Maluk Timor staff work with local PSFs to:
- Equip them with relevant skills and knowledge about maternal health
- Train them to identify infectious and chronic diseases
- Empower them to promote better health outcomes in their local villages
- Receive information about locals who’ve been identified as having health concerns, then linking them with further local health facilities for ongoing treatment
Long-term investments in healthier children in Timor-Leste
With foundational maternal healthcare in place, newborns are given better support at the beginning of their lives in Timor-Leste. Our care then extends into long-term investments in their quality of life in the future, working to tackle the impact of malnutrition on their childhood and life.
Timor-Leste’s child malnutrition rates are still among the highest in the world, even as the country has worked to halve this rate in the last 20 years. With one in five children presenting to Timor-Leste’s community health centres with moderate to severe malnutrition, there’s much more work to be done.
Maluk Timor’s work in building better support for children and impacted mothers alike includes:
- Upskilling nutrition specialists – by hosting regular nutrition networking events, we support the upskilling and peer learning of nutrition workers. This helps us to circumvent the challenge of finding culturally appropriate ways to share nutrition education, allowing for local knowledge sharing to overcome these barriers to access.
- Strengthening the malnutrition referral system – by working with the Ministry of Health, Hospital Nacional Guido Valadares (HNGV) and five Community Health Clinics, we’ve been able to strengthen the referral and follow-ups system for children who are either at risk of or already suffering from malnutrition.
By investing in the eradication of malnutrition in Timor-Leste, we’re working to connect the power of maternal care with long-term support for every child’s future.
Conclusion
Behind every healthy child in Timor-Leste is not just a mother who’s been supported and resourced, but a community that has access to integral healthcare services. At Maluk Timor, we build this support in a variety of holistic and complementing ways, combining mobile outreach clinics, nutrition programs, community healthcare leader training, and long-term counselling for malnutrition. This long-term work will continue to build a future where every child born into Timor-Leste has access to crucial healthcare support from their first breath. You can be a part of bringing this vision to life by joining our Maluk Timor family of global supporters.