Maternal & Child Health

Empowering Timorese to improve the health of women and girls

We are working to champion empowerment and improved health of Timorese women and girls especially in rural areas

Our current program is taking a multi-pronged approach to supporting pregnant women, children, health care workers and community health care workers in Ermera.

The aim is to improve health outcomes, in an area where access to maternal and child health services have traditionally been limited, many women birth at home and health literacy is low. The area is very mountainous, roads can be treacherous and infrastructure limited.

What are we doing?

Improving maternal health care

The program aims to encourage women to come for antenatal care visits. It is common in Timor that women do not attend antenatal care and many birth at home without a skilled birth attendant.

Maluk Timor is supporting communities by providing mobile outreach clinics.

Our staff work with local community health care workers to build their skills to provide respectful comprehensive maternity care.

Data shows women are now coming for more antenatal appointments and some are now choosing to birth at the health care facility with skilled attendants.

Antenatal clinics are identifying women with high risk pregnancies and supporting them to seek care at higher level facilities.

The team are taking a participatory action based approach to further understand cultural barriers and health knowledge gaps the community’s face.

In 2022 PSF's:

174 Women attended antenatal care appointments

Child malnutrition assessment, counselling and follow up

Malnutrition is very common in Timor. This program works in conjunction with the maternal health program. Women and any older children are able to receive a malnutrition screen. Non pregnant mothers can also bring their children for screening. When malnutrition is identified mothers receive nutritional information and counselling.

Ongoing follow up of women and children is occurring.

In 2024/25

350 women and children identified as having malnutrition and receiving ongoing assessment and counselling.

Training community health care workers

PSFs (Promotor Saúde Familiar) are the Community Health Workers of Timor-Leste.

They are elected from their community’s to become local health promotors and create links between their communities and National healthcare facilities.

Maluk Timor staff work with the PSF’s to give them relevant skills and knowledge about maternal health, infectious and chronic diseases and health promotion.

PSF’s become an integral part of their community through sharing the information they have learned to educate their community members.

They also play a pivotal role in linking people who have been identified as having heath concerns with their local health facility