No other choice

Women in South Sudan have the great responsibility to give birth in hard conditions and raise families with little resources.

Txata Male, a mother of three children, breastfeeds her newborn baby Talata (4 days old) outside her shelter in Dangaji, a village in Maban, South Sudan. © Albert González Farran

Txata is a mother of three children. She gave birth few days ago in Dangaji, a very remote village in Maban county, in South Sudan, where health services are really limited.

She lives with a disability in her right side of the body, but she keeps sustaining her family as best as she can. Her husband is away most of the time, and she is the only one to provide food, water and shelter to her children and her elder mother.

Life of women and mothers in South Sudan, as in many countries in Africa, is greatly tough. They assume the hardest work, even in their late pregnancies or when they need to look after newborn babies. There are no other choices. Lives are under their responsibility. And this is something totally hard to assume. Too hard.

According to WHO, South Sudan has one of the highest rates of maternal and neonatal mortality in the world, apart from the shocking rate of under-five mortality (10%).

For more information, read a report in El País newspaper (in Spanish language).