A community of breast milk donors has formed in Uganda after women struggled with finding ways to keep their babies with health issues alive
Early last year, Caroline Ikendi was in distress after undergoing an emergency Caesarean section to remove a stillborn baby and save two others. Doctors said one of the preterm babies had a 2% chance of living.
If the babies didn’t get breast milk — which she didn’t have — Ikendi could lose them as well.
Thus began a desperate search for breast milk donors. She was lucky with a neighbor, a woman with a newborn baby to feed who was willing to donate a few millilitres at a time.
“You go and plead for milk. You are like, ‘Please help me, help my child,'” Ikendi told The Associated Press.
The neighbor helped until Ikendi heard about a Ugandan group that collects breast milk and donates it to mothers like her. Soon the ATTA Breastmilk Community was giving the breast milk she needed, free of charge, until her babies were strong enough to be discharged from the hospital.
ATTA Breastmilk Community was launched in 2021 in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, by a woman who had struggled like Ikendi without getting support. The registered nonprofit, backed by grants from organizations and individuals, is the only group outside a hospital setting in Uganda that conserves breast milk in substantial amounts.
ATTA, as the group is known, receives calls for support from hospitals and homes with babies born too soon or too sick to latch onto their mothers’ breasts.
More than 200 mothers have donated breast milk to support over 450 babies since July 2021, with over 600 liters of milk delivered for babies in that period, according to ATTA’s records.
In a measure of efforts to build a reliable community, many donors have given multiple times while others help to find new ones, said ATTA administrator Racheal Akugizibwe.
“We are an emergency fix,” Akugizibwe said. “As the mother is working on their own production, we are giving (her) milk. But we do it under the directive and under the support of a lactation specialist and the medical people.”
She added: “Every mother who has given us milk, they are kind of attached to us. They are we; we are them.
