History

The concept of the Clean Birth Kit began in 1995, when Adelaide Doctor, Joy O’Hazy, attended the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and heard Sally Field speaking about a similar kit she had seen in Nepal. With the idea that hygiene was key to improving maternal and newborn survival in low resource settings, Joy developed the Clean Birth Kit– a small zip-lock bag containing six basic and clean items to be distributed to women and birthing attendants in low-resource and emergency settings.

In partnership with the Adelaide Hills Zonta Club, Joy and the dedicated volunteers began assembling and distributing these simple kits around the world. The scale and impact of this project continued to grow, in partnership with Zonta Australia, and what was once known as the ‘Zonta Birthing Kit Project’ transformed into the Birthing Kit Foundation Australia in September 2006.

Since our establishment, we have worked to extend and enhance our reach, forming strong partnerships with many Global Partners in the Sub-Saharan Africa, Asian and Indo-Pacific regions, to date, in over 47 countries around the world.  Our work has expanded from the original Birthing Kit Program to a range of Community Development Projects that engage individuals, families and communities to create sustainable change and improve maternal and newborn health outcomes.

Because we know the future of mothers and their children depends on more than just what happens at the moment of birth, we continue to invest in broader education and livelihood activities. Some of that includes training 10,000 Traditional Birth Attendants around the world and empowering a number of professional health workers who have gone on to train an additional 3000 birth attendants.