Zimbabwe: $50 Million For Maternity Booking Fee in Harare!

Kids!

They bring joy to our lives.

We all love kids, this is shown by how we rejoice and celebrate when a baby is born.
Couples try all different things if for one reason they can't have children. Now for my fellow ZImbabweans back home, having kids is going to cost them a lot of money.

Harare City Council has just announced that with immediate effect, fees at all it's health institutions are going up by 100 percent.

The fees at all Harare City Council health institutions are also expected to go up again by 100 percent with effect from one April this year.
Consultation fees for both clinics and hospitals have increased to ZW$10 million.

Research has shown that population tends to increase more in poor communities. Poor people make more babies than rich communities. This is probably the same situation in Zimbabwe. There is poverty in most communities, there is no food, no drugs and there is poor or no service in hospitals and clinics.
Zimbabwe has got one of the highest rate of unemployment in the world. The working majority are all below the poverty datum line. Inflation rate is too high and embarasing to talk about.

I was also wondering whether this has got something to do with lack of other things to do out of work. Say entertainment,
Well most of the times there is no electricty in most suburbs in Zimbabwe, so people can not watch TV, thus they retire to bed early.
I have also head a lot of stories about Zimbabwe man's favourite drink chibuku 'scud'. Sorry I'm not going to talk about this now.

Maybe because of a lot of manual work to be done in these poor communities, maybe it's a motivation to have more babies!

Well, so why don't they use all these family planning methods around? Could it be the cost, or maybe lack of knowledge? Surely there must be traditional methods available.

Well for my fellow Zimbabweans back home, besides having to rely on community midwives. Surely how many of them will afford the $50 million maternity booking fees. As for foreigners living in Harare, well they have to pay $100 million.

Consultation fees for family health services costs $2 million. Something called Pap smear costs $10 million, Depo Provera costs $5 million and family planning pills now cost $1 million.

So, probably Zimbabwe is set for a population boom now. How many people will afford all these expenses when there is nothing to eat in the house. Well. after all there is nothing wrong in having babies.

So what do you think? Feel free to leave your comment.