A few weeks ago, I attended a Save The Children Blogger Conference along with Ruth at Dorky Mum, Michelle at Mummy Rates It, Chloe at Cookie Jar Life, KellyAnn at Tea & Biscotti. Alongside lots of other bloggers who have been galvanised into action as a result of the conference, we wanted to do something to help raise funds for a very important Save The Children campaign: Build It For Babies.
Build It For Babies: What’s It All About?
I remember like yesterday the excited planning frenzy I got myself into when I found out I was pregnant. Out came the excel spreadsheet and on it grew the mother of all shopping lists.
As my bump grew, so did the stash of stuff. From bottle warmers to foot muffs via baby bouncers and Bumbos, I amassed the lot. None of it, not even the cute soft toys cushioned the blow of almost losing my daughter at birth.
Now my focus is on a baby related shopping list of a different nature. A list put together by Save The Children for their Build it for Babies initiative. This is the kind of list that will help stop mothers and babies from dying during or soon after birth. This is the kind of baby shopping list that saves lives.
The aim of Build it for Babies is to raise £1 million to build, staff and buy equipment for seven life-saving clinics in Bangladesh. Clinics where women will be able to give birth in a clean, safe, medical environment. And where women and babies will receive pre and post-natal care and support.
You only have to read a few of the statistics that Save The Children shared with us to understand the importance of this campaign:
“Every hour of every day 11 newborn babies will die in Bangladesh simply because they don’t have access to the most basic healthcare. 170,000 under fives die needlessly of diseases we know how to treat or prevent.”
Seeing statistics like these make me appreciate all the more that I live in a country where a super-charged neo-natal intensive care unit was on hand to swoop in and save the life of my daughter. Put simply. If she’d been born in Bangladesh, she wouldn’t be here now and I quite possibly wouldn’t either.
Shefali, a Bangladeshi mother told Save The Children, “Our children are dying. We give birth to two and one is dying. We give birth to three and two are dying. I don’t know what to expect for the future of my children.”
How you can add Build it for Babies to your shopping list:
You can select Build it for Babies as your charity of choice to support through BritMums For Good whilst shopping via Give As You Live.
You can also pay a visit to Save The Children’s Build it for Babies virtual clinic microsite: www.savethechildren.org.uk/buildit and shop directly for something that you would like to buy for the women and children of Bangladesh.
Here’s a few of the items you’ll find on the Build it for Babies shopping list:
- £5 can buy a brick – without which there will quite simply be no health centres
- £14 can buy a set of scales for weighing babies
- £49 could buy a delivery kit, a complete set of equipment for delivering babies safely
- £150 could pay for a paramedic for a month to treat acutely ill children
- £1,000 could buy a year’s supply of emergency medical kits to help mothers with difficult deliveries
- £2,500 can help build a well to provide clean water for the clinic and keep families safe from deadly diseases.
Without the clinics, tragically thousands of children and babies will continue to die of preventable diseases. What better way is there to ease the guilt of a shopping splurge than knowing that you are doing it for charity!
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