Kenya's only breast milk bank saves premature babies

Surrounded by incubators, four-day-old Grace-Ella is fed breast milk from women other than her mother at Nairobi's Pumwani Maternity Hospital, the only hospital offering this vital support to premature babies in Kenya.

In this East African country, approximately 134,000 babies are born prematurely each year, according to official data. And the complications arising from this are the leading cause of neonatal mortality.

Mothers who give birth too early struggle to produce breast milk. Therefore, they must resort to powdered formulas, which can be less nutritious and increase the risk of infection, especially if the water used to mix them is contaminated.

But Kenya's milk bank, set up in 2019 with support from the NGO Path and British funding, allows babies like Grace-Ella to benefit from the generosity of others.

“It was really exciting,” recalled her mother, Margaret Adhiambo, who had never heard of the solution before giving birth at 30 weeks pregnant.

She admits she was skeptical at first. "I felt guilty, like I couldn't give my daughter my own breast milk," she explains. But in the end, "it helped me because she didn't go hungry," she adds.

- "To help" -

The Pumwani maternity hospital is the only one offering this service in Kenya, something also uncommon in the rest of the continent. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 43% of the world's neonatal deaths, although this region is home to less than 16% of the world's population, according to World Bank estimates.

Underweight babies face numerous health risks, and breast milk can tip the scales in their favor.

"When we feed them breast milk, we notice that they grow faster than babies fed formula," Muthoni Ogola, the doctor in charge of the program, told AFP.

The World Health Organization (WHO), however, estimates that less than half of newborns in the world are fed exclusively with breast milk.

One of the main benefits of breast milk is the antibodies that are passed on to the baby, says Hannah Wangeci Maina, a nurse at Pumwani, which has a capacity for 90 patients.

“We usually have a lot of mothers waiting in line to receive breast milk,” she says.

During AFP's visit, Wangeci Maina accompanied 22-year-old Esther Wanjiru through her donation process. She was tested for infectious diseases, such as HIV and hepatitis, before sitting down to express her milk.

"It's nice to help," says the first-time mother. "It's kind of like a massage," she says with a shy smile.

Your milk will be analyzed before and after pasteurization. It will then be frozen and can be stored for up to 12 months.

– Financing –

It's frustrating for hospital staff that they only have enough equipment to provide milk to the children admitted to their facility, plus occasional donations to two other hospitals.

Breast milk banks remain a much more economical option than formula, but the equipment is expensive, explains Christine Kiteshuo, director of the Pumwani maternity hospital.

“Some of this equipment is only available in Europe or the United States, which makes it difficult for us to acquire it,” he highlights.

The hospital would like to help more mothers if it had more resources, especially those living in impoverished communities without refrigerators or clean running water.

"It's one of the challenges we face today. We can't help mothers outside the facilities," laments Kiteshuo.

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