Fistula surgery for women with Fistula Foundation

Obstetric fistula is among the most devastating of childbirth injuries. It happens when a woman goes through prolonged obstructed labour without access to emergency obstetric care, and the sustained pressure cuts blood flow to the tissue between the birth canal and the bladder or rectum. The tissue dies, leaving a hole, and the woman is left incontinent.

The medical consequences are chronic infection and pain. The social consequences are often worse. Where the cause is poorly understood, a woman is frequently blamed for her own condition and shunned by her neighbours and sometimes her family. Well over a million women are estimated to be living with it, most of them in poor rural areas of Africa and Asia.

There is no medication for fistula. Corrective surgery is the only cure, and performed by a skilled surgeon it very often restores continence completely, which is what allows a woman to return to her community. Funding pays for the surgeries themselves and for the surgical capacity behind them, across a network of hospital partners in more than 20 countries. The average cost of one operation is in the hundreds of dollars rather than the thousands.

Only around 20,000 repairs happen annually against a backlog in the millions, so the constraint is funding and trained surgeons, not knowing what to do. The charity coordinating this work is Fistula Foundation.

Gifts through Rethink Charity come with an official Canadian donation receipt. Because a single surgery has a known cost, this is a program where a one-time gift translates unusually cleanly into a specific outcome.