In Senegal, a mother’s ordeal exposes a health system under strain

Dakar, Senegal – Twenty-four hours before health workers across Senegal were due to walk out on strike, Awa Diba went into labour.Her first child was coming into the world as hospitals prepared to limit services to emergency care.“There is a lot of shouting,” Diba says.“I saw things inside the hospital that shocked me.”Her labour lasted 24 hours.Her husband and other relatives were absent. She shared a room with four other women. Cracks ran across the ceiling. The fan did not work. Some rooms had air conditioning; others did not. Electricity was intermittent.Women cried. Some were frightened. Sometimes, she says, their cries were met with: “Be quiet.”A system she never expected to enterDiba entered the hospital as a trainee nurse and left as a mother, carrying a healthy daughter. The experience left her feeling that the system itself was unwell.She grew up in Casamance, in southern Senegal, and studied digital communication at university in Ziguinchor.“It is difficult to find work with that here,” she says.In the first quarter of 2026, Senegal’s unemployment rate among people aged 15 to 34 was 28.4 percent, according to the country’s National Agency of Statistics and Demography (AN...