Hope for Grace Kodindo is not about one doctor. It’s about hope for all women in Chad, and indeed in Africa as a whole. A hope that one day soon the world will regard them as equals with their counterparts in the rich West.

Dr Grace Kodindo

Dr Felicité Belingar

Dr Grace, as she is known, was our initial inspiration. Trained as an obstetrician in Canada and Sudan, she could be working on a high salary in the comfortable West. Instead, she went back to Chad, to where she felt her countrywomen needed her more. She has worked at the Hôpital Général de Référence in N’Djamena since 1977.

In June 2005 she was the subject of a BBC Panorama documentary called "Dead Mums Don’t Cry". In the UK, millions of viewers saw how, in the face of acute shortages and government indifference, the hospital staff struggled to provide care for the women and babies in their care. The documentary has been shown around the world, even to the United Nations. The message is clear – why should women in Africa die while their counterparts in the West live?

Grace is involved with a research programme into maternal mortality, Averting Maternal Death and Disability (AMDD) and also with developing a long-term plan with the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) for Chad as a whole. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Community Service Award in Emergency Obstetrics Care from the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics in 2000. She is a founding member of Chad-PMM and ASTBEF, a family planning association.