The government of Zimbabwe will investigate every maternity delivery death and every death of a
child under five among Vapostori.

This was revealed by the Minister of Health and Child Welfare Henry Madzorera at the launch of the Health Transition Fund in Marondera last week.

Statics of maternal and child mortality in Zimbabwe have been worrying in the past decade, with at least eight women dying while giving birth daily, while 100 children die daily often from preventable causes. The members of the Apostolic Church who do not go to hospitals for religious reasons are among the most affected by deaths. 

Recently thousands of children born of Vapostori parents died from measles, with their parents fleeing into the bush to avoid immunization.

Apart from that, some members of the Apostolic Church are now delivering in bushes to avoid going to the hospital. This has resulted in avoidable deaths of pregnant women and children.

However, despite the grim facts of women and child’s deaths, there has been no recent investigation into the issue, something that Madzorera said was last done in the 1980s. “Sometimes people die not because there are no hospitals but simply because of negligence or lack of the will to go to hospitals. So we are going to investigate. But this is not something new, as the country used to do it in previous years but was done away with because of the problems that we faced as a country before the Government of National Unity (GNU),” Madzorera said in an interview with The Zimbabwean.