Enock Mnyenyembe — Citizen Champion
Celebrate Father’s Day by meeting a maternal health advocate who understands the role of men in safeguarding maternal health.
By Brigid McConville, White Ribbon Alliance
In March of 2017, Enock Mnyenyembe achieved an impossible dream. After all, how many children from rural Malawi, born of parents who couldn’t afford to send him to school, end up graduating from university with a degree in journalism?
My whole community is amazed at what I have done. They didn’t believe it was possible. I am a role model to my village because they have seen that if you work hard you can succeed.
It has been a long, tough road. Enock had to drop out of education for years at a time to grow and sell vegetables to get the money he needed to continue. He’s now 35, so it’s taken over a decade longer than usual to get his degree. At times he worked for an NGO in one town and studied in another, completing assignments in hours rather than the days given to other students.
But he’s made it — and there will be nothing stopping him now. He has hopes of a Masters one day, and meanwhile in his role as Communications Officer for White Ribbon Alliance Malawi, Enock is bringing change to his country so that women and newborns no longer die in childbirth for lack of decent health care.
The issue touches him personally because in the village where he grew up, Bayani Mnyenyembe in northern Malawi, deaths in childbirth and deaths of newborns were all too common. The nearest health centre is 17 kilometers from Bayani, many hours walk along rough tracks for a woman in labour, especially when her baby is stuck or she has started to bleed.
Like many Malawians, Enock’s parents were subsistence farmers who never had the chance to get an education. Of their six children, the girls were selected for secondary education but for lack of school fees they were married young. Enock’s two brothers chose to invest what cash they earned in livestock, but he chose education because, he says ‘‘’it stays with you for life”.
And Enock still hopes to continue his education to Masters or beyond some day. “My whole community is amazed at what I have done,” he says. “They didn’t believe it was possible. I am a role model to my village because they have seen that if you work hard you can succeed.”
Journalism appealed to him because “you learn how government operates and you can change the situation. If you ask a leader the right question, they will change their position by trying to give an answer which will appeal to the people. In press conferences you can ask things which make politicians switch around their sentences!”
And this is what truly motives him: “I have very strong feelings that things must change in my country. The way things work is good for the elite, but 80% of Malawians are left behind.” The solution? “The community must decide about what kind of development they want and need,” he says, “instead of receiving projects that start and then stop, without knowing what happened to the money.”
When Enock first heard White Ribbon Alliance Malawi advocating for improved maternal health services he took the message to his home community and persuaded them to sign the WRA petition demanding more midwives in the country. According to White Ribbon Alliance Malawi’s ‘Bedside Midwives Report’, there are 3,420 bedside midwives in Malawi serving an estimated population of 17.3 million people. That’s a ratio of 5,058 people per midwife, compared with the WHO recommendation of 175 people per midwife.
Then in the town of Mzuzu where he found work with FM Power 101 and as a member of Malawi’s Health Writers Association, he took up the issue of maternal health with local politicians and founded a local chapter of WRA.
It was a few years later that he attended a workshop organised by WRA Uganda on Citizen Journalism which he says “changed my life”. Enock was accustomed to writing articles of several pages to meet a deadline on any topic — the standard job of journalists. “But in the workshop I learned about impact!” he says. “I began to think in terms of — what change will this article bring?” Enock had become a campaigning journalist. Since then he has been holding politicians to account for their promises on maternal health, and after an article he wrote, the government increased health services to the District he had featured.
These days he lives in Lilongwe with his wife Monica Ziba, aged 31, and their two young children. Monica he says “always encouraged me and gave me hope to continue my education.” Monica is now going back to education herself. She is taking science subjects so that she can become a nurse and then a midwife.
It sounds already like a happy ending, but you can say one thing for sure about Enock: there is much more to come in his remarkable story!
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