So said 25-year-old Shabnam* to me. For Shabnam, who lives in a village of Sindh province, delivering babies in a hospital is a privilege that most other women living in the same village do not have. She belongs to a family that has their own transportation and can afford the expenses to take women to well-equipped hospitals in big cities. For the majority of the women, delivering babies at home and seeking the help of unskilled midwives is a common and affordable alternative.

Although Pakistan’s key social indicators – education and health – have been showing progress over the years, the maternal, infant and child mortality rates still do not meet the 2015 MDG target.

Mortality on all levels has witnessed gradual decline, yet the curbing of infant mortality rates has remained a hard nut to crack, staggering way behind the expected targets.

The year 2014 came with adverse influence of the problems that Pakistan has been facing for a long time now. Amid the web of natural disasters and terrorism, Save the Children (UK) declared that Pakistan has the highest first day deaths and still births in the world — another blow to the country's failing status.

The report further disclosed that about 40.7 per 1000 babies are either still borns or die within 24 hours of their birth, due to lack of available skilled care, one of the reasons which has exacerbated the situation in rural areas where the majority of the country's population lives. This unskilled care comes from local elderly women called daai(s), who are usually illiterate and lack scientific training.

The obvious fact is access to health and education in villages depends on the village's proximity to these facilities. The more isolated the village, the more are its people dependent on daais. But even in the case of villages not too far away, the proximity is not helpful if they are not physically connected with nearby cities.