By Sarah Bray
"There's a saying that when you're pregnant in Africa you have one foot in the grave already," Liya Kebede says as she waits to take the stage for a panel on maternal mortality at Tina Brown's Women in the World Summit in Manhattan this spring. If her life had taken a different turn, the model and mother of two could have been one of the 250,000 women who die every year in Africa from pregnancy and childbirth complications. "I had the opportunity to have my children in New York, in an amazing facility with great doctors, versus what my experience would have been in Ethiopia."
Since being discovered in her hometown of Addis Ababa as a teen, Kebede has had a whirlwind career, and at 38 she continues to book major campaigns, such as Estée Lauder. A decade ago, while serving as a goodwill ambassador for maternal and child health for the World Health Organization, she decided she wanted to do more than lend her face: "I was raising awareness, but I wanted a program on the ground." Thus the Liya Kebede Foundation was born. (Two years later, in 2007, she also launched her brand, Lemlem, for which she employs traditional African weavers to craft clothing and accessories, which are sold at Barneys, J. Crew, and Net-A-Porter.)
Her foundation focuses on funding and training healthcare workers; it recently partnered with the NGO Amref Health Africa to train 15,000 midwives. "These women aren't dying because there's no cure for their problem. They're dying from very simple conditions like hemorrhaging or high blood pressure, or the baby being too big," Kebede says. "And these are all things that we know how to stop, prevent, and treat."
