MamaCare Ghana aids women and children

CVHS and Olympian alum Ali Nosseir has taken his experiences from journalism to help raise an initiative known as MamaCare Ghana to bring quality maternal and child health care to rural villages in the Northern Volta Region of Ghana.

Nosseir’s parents immigrated from Egypt to the US in their 20s. Returning yearly to Egypt, he saw mothers struggling to provide for their children, and children having to work as street vendors. Maturing into understanding his privilege and the luck of being born in the U.S., he is now supporting MamaCare Ghana, an initiative for training and aiding breast cancer treatment in Ghana.

“So as I’ve matured, I’ve started realizing that I’m very grateful to be in the position that I have today,” Nosseir said. “We’re all humans. We’re all part of the same species. And I really think it’s really sad how many people live, not knowing when their next meal is, not having access to clean water.”

In northern Ghana, of every 1,000 kids born, 100 don’t make it past the age of 5. This is absolutely unacceptable, yet still happens. This has raised the fertility rate to five to six kids per mother, on the premise that some won’t make it. The problem with this fertility rate is that there is no birth control, nor the resources to support that many kids effectively. Hygiene and good nutrition are unaffordable. 

And it’s a cycle too. The children who survive grow to have children who die. Ten percent of these children die before being on Earth for more than about 1826.25 days. Imagine your five year old dying. You probably can’t even imagine them dying without hurting.

MamaCare Ghana is here to stop this cycle. The group provides education about birth and children as a whole; how to treat the patient with a fetus in the womb, how to handle STDs, how to give birth to the child, and how to raise the child. Every year, they educate 600 women, with 490 reporting significant improvements to their decision making and livelihood—clearly displaying the gap between being capable of learning and doing, yet not getting the education to do so. 

Nosseir wants to add another 50 women with his work. He joined MamaCare Ghana because the organization focuses on education, rather than raw funding. Teach a man to fish over feeding a man a fish.

“So rather than just sending someone over there, like a licensed medical professional, and help deliver a couple babies or something like that, help them raise the kids, I think it’s really important to teach the people there how to effectively raise these kids and deliver the babies,” Nosseir said. “Because that kind of knowledge can be passed down generations and generations, which could have a long-lasting impact on the people there.”

A big thing about Nosseir’s humanitarian work is his financial transparency. When donating to other nonprofits, you can find them donating to other nonprofits. Through Nosseir, he keeps his donors in-the-know; i.e., they donate $10, he tells them where that money goes; he’s buying this birth control, doing this, handling that—this is what is happening to your money.

Ultimately, Nosseir wants to establish his own nonprofit organization dedicated to generating funds for humanitarian efforts in other organizations, advocating for financial transparency in the same way he informs his current donors about how their money is spent. In the meantime, he is supporting MamaCare Ghana for all they do in medical education in Ghana. To change the abominable statistics.

You can contact Nosseir to donate items, managing when and how, at <alinosseir@ucla.edu>, donate money to the organization at <mamacareghana.org>, (and!)/or through Nosseir with a GoFundMe at <gofundme.com/f/support-safer-births-in-northern-ghana>. MamaCare Ghana currently needs prenatal vitamins, medical equipment, family supplies, contraceptives, hygiene supplies, nutrition supplies, and stationery supplies such as files and pens.