Women’s clinic in South Sudan a casualty of distracted world

In a country where the maternal mortality rate is one of the highest in the world, a small clinic dedicated to reproductive health care for more than 200,000 people is about to be shut down. The worried-looking mothers know too well what might happen next.

“If the hospital closes, we will die more because we are poor,” said one expectant mother who gave her name only as Chuti. She was attending a monthly checkup at the Mingkaman reproductive health clinic in this town on the White Nile River, and it might be her last.

The United Nations has said it intends to end the clinic’s operations by December because of a lack of funding from European and other supporters. It is just one casualty among many in developing countries as humanitarian donors have been stretched by one crisis after another, from COVID-19 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The U.N. would