Many women in eastern Chad are being forced to give birth in overcrowded clinics with limited medicine, minimal equipment and severe shortages of anesthesia, as a worsening humanitarian crisis overwhelms the country's fragile healthcare system, the UN reproductive health agency, UNFPA, warned on Tuesday.
The crisis is unfolding as Chad struggles to cope with a massive influx of refugees and returnees fleeing the civil war in neighbouring Sudan, placing enormous pressure on already stretched services in the country's east.
"Chad is currently hosting more than 1.3 million refugees and returnees, most of them women and children" Andrew Saberton, UNFPA Deputy Executive Director, told journalists at UN Headquarters, in New York, following a recent mission to eastern Chad.
