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Projects


Money donated to our charity is directed to partner organisations working on the ground in developing countries to prevent women dying in childbirth.
We choose projects which are long-term, sustainable and empowering for women, such as training midwives and birth attendants or supplying basic supplies to assist with birth.

Our partners include:

We are also proud to partner with international maternal health campaign Every Mother Counts and are grateful for the encouragement and support of founder Christy Turlington Burns.

As our charity grows, we hope to bring you stories of women and babies for whom your donation has made the difference between life and death.

If you are working in the maternal health space and are interested in applying for funding, please contact us.

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Papua New Guinea


As a country on our doorstep which has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, Send Hope Not Flowers has spent the last three years providing a particular focus to funding urgent maternal health programs in PNG.
You can elect to specifically support the following projects:
Doctor Barry Kirby

Australian Doctor Barry Kirby is nothing short of inspirational in his one-man battle to lower the death toll in some of the most remote parts of the country. You can read more about his work here.

In Milne Bay in 2012, Dr Kirby trialled an innovative new intervention which offers “mother and baby gifts” of basic supplies for mothers when they attend a supervised birth in a health centre. The gifts cost about $35 (Australian) and includes cotton nappies, a blanket, sanitary supplies for the mother and baby clothes wrapped in a plastic baby bath as well…

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Indonesia


The Flinders Overseas Health Group brings Australian volunteer doctors and midwives together to deliver practical training in the management of obstetric and neonatal emergencies to small groups of “front-line” midwives on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia.
Participants report significant improvements in their confidence in dealing with emergency situations, and benefit from the hands-on nature of the training.

In this isolated and poorly resourced environment, the nearest hospital is over two hours away, and many of the health centres where births take place lack basic equipment and have staff who may lack adequate training to deal with a birth emergency.

Small group teaching encourages continuing on-the-job practice, and the day-to-day passing on of these simple but life-saving skills to colleagues, creating a self-sustaining ripple effect.

Funds from Send Hope Not Flowers have provided essential equipment for this training, and has also subsidised costs for Australian midwives to take part…

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The Solomon Islands


The National Referral Hospital (NRH) in the nation’s capital city, Honiara, serves most of the country’s high risk pregnancies and deliveries due to under resourced hospitals across the island’s regional areas.
Yet a study undertaken by the Pacific Society for Reproductive Health found emergency trolleys were not supplied to manage obstetric complications with equipment often borrowed from other wards.

In April 2012, a fifth of all deliveries at the NRH experienced some sort of complication but management of the deliveries were unnecessarily delayed or denied because of a lack of proper emergency obstetric kits. Send Hope provided $32,700 to restock emergency obstetric equipment to specifically address this shortfall.

Dr David Mills

Kompiam Rural Hospital


Dr David Mills is an Australian GP who has spent the last 20 year living in PNG where he runs the Kompiam Rural Hospital in the remote and extremely disadvantaged Enga Province. Using the example of our other dedicated partners Dr Barry Kirby and Professor Glen Mola, Dr Mills has been distributing baby bundles as an incentive to get local women to present for a supervised birth. His initial work in getting these baby bundles out in 2019 saw supervised deliveries double almost immediately and Send Hope is now partnering with Dr Mills to to secure ongoing baby bundles supplies to the hospital. Prior to this intervention some parts of the province had a supervised delivery rate of just 10 per cent. That means 90 per cent of village women gave birth with little or no help and it suffered one of the highest maternal mortality rates in a country that is already one of the most dangerous in the world for women to give birth.