How Poverty Affects the Health Development of Girls and Women in Kwadaso Municipality - Health Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Abstract

This proposal discusses “how poverty and poor health affects the health development of girls and women in Kwadaso Municipality”. Poverty is high on the international development agenda. World conferences and summits have paid attention to the increasing levels of poverty of billions of the world’s peoples. The poor die in young age and they usually suffer from communicable diseases, maternal and perinatal conditions, and nutritional deficiencies. They are not only at risk from diseases of the poor but they also suffer from lifestyle health problems that are often found among affluent communities. Unfortunately, in many communities, the most affected are women and children.

Introduction

Poverty is about not having enough to meet basic needs. The World Bank describes poverty as hunger, lack of shelter, not having access to school and lack of medical care. The World Bank estimates that in 2012, 896 million people were living on less than $1.90 per day. Most of the poor are in the developing countries including Ghana where about 82% of the population lives in abject poverty. The World Health Organization states that poverty creates ill-health because it forces people to live in dirty environments. In a poverty-stricken country, the poor suffer from ill health. The greatest burden of health risks is borne by the disadvantaged in societies especially women and children who are often poor, have very little formal education and low occupations. Globally, among women of reproductive age, maternal mortality is the second leading cause of death, and women face a 1 in 180 chance of dying from maternal causes. The WHO further states that the proportion of children under five years old who were underweight declined by 11 percentage points between 1990 and 2014, from 25% to 14%. While Africa has experienced the smallest relative decrease, with underweight prevalence of 16% in 2014 down from 23% in 1990, in Asia for the same period it reduced from 32% to 18% and in Latin America and the Caribbean from 8% to 3%.

Ideally, women should have a caloric intake that covers their energy expenditure and physiological needs as well as specific nutrients such as folic acid and iron when pregnant and lactating, this is not so for women in developing countries where a malnourished mother can lose

as much as 7 kilograms after a year of lactation. In most cases, these women are anemic as a result of iron deficiency. Anaemia has serious health consequences and can lead to heart failure and maternal death due to blood loss during delivery. Goitre is also prevalent especially among pregnant women and young girls due to iodine deficiency. Furthermore, women dispose off all excreta; consequently, they are exposed to infectious diseases, which result in increased utilization of calories and loss of protein and other nutrients exacerbating maternal malnutrition.

Due to poverty, childcare becomes complicated as parents have inadequate resources to take care of their children’s needs. Mothers have to work or sell some merchandise in the streets to earn a living and children are left at home under the care of their older siblings without proper meals.

The effects of poverty are most often interrelated so that one problem rarely occurs alone, for instance, poor sanitation makes it easier to spread around old and new diseases, and hunger and lack of water make people more vulnerable to them. Impoverished communities often suffer from discrimination and end up being caught in cycles of poverty.

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