Nine kilometres, and a delivery kit in the bag

Prossy is 26 and lives with her husband and two sons in a village in Kacheera sub-county. Her first baby arrived at home, at night, with her mother-in-law helping. Her second arrived on the back of a motorbike, halfway to the health centre.

"I was not afraid of giving birth," she says. "I was afraid of the road."

When she was seven months pregnant with her third child, a neighbour told her about a clinic at the primary school on Saturday. She went because it was close, and because it was free.

The first check

A MANCO midwife measured her blood pressure, felt for the baby's position and listened to the heartbeat. Then she asked a question no one had asked before: where will you give birth, and how will you get there?

The midwife wrote the name of the health centre on my card and said, this is where you go. Nobody had told me that before.

Together they made a plan. A named facility. A rider her husband trusted. A phone number to call if the bleeding started early. And a clean delivery kit, packed into a plastic bag with a card showing the danger signs in pictures.

The night it started

Labour started at two in the morning. The rider came. Prossy delivered a healthy girl at the health centre ninety minutes later, with a midwife and a light.

She never needed the kit. She gave it to her younger sister, who was due two months later.

"Now I tell other women," she says. "Go on Saturday. Ask them for the plan."