We do thank you for your question. It's a very important question: how do we move forward?
As we speak today, there's no global standard for midwifery education. What this means is that various countries have invented programs to educate midwives. The International Confederation of Midwives, along with the World Health Organization, as we speak, has a global task force that is developing an international standard for midwifery education for governments to use as reference points for educating midwives. This will allow governments to also create a career path for midwifery. In too many countries midwives have an 18-month training period, a two-year training period, and there's no opportunity to complete an undergraduate degree program and go on into master's, post-graduate work, etc., to get into policy development and research.
Upholding and supporting the development of education programs as a way to build a midwifery workforce globally is one of the most fundamental and essential pieces of work that Canada can contribute to in terms of its actual contribution to workforce development. The other is to help countries develop regulations and standards of practice for not only midwives... In many countries, such as Haiti, there are no regulations and standards of practice for any health care profession in that country.
In terms of Bangladesh, I was there as well. When you have the community health workers who are being trained to attend normal childbirth, they must be supervised and trained by a cadre of midwives. That cadre is missing right now, so the countries are developing tens of thousands of community health workers, doing normal birth, but they're not paying attention to who is supervising and training them over the long term.