End Malaria in Children of Rural communities, Kano

Dear supporters, family and friends of Serendipity,

The #Without Malaria campaign we launched in schools in Tarauni Local Governing council of Kano early last year 2019 where we developed a malaria school curriculum and trained 50 students within one week in both Junior and Senior High school with a guide to prevent the prevalence of malaria in their community has taken us to doing this campaign in the communities being that with the pandemic in the world we can not continue the campaign of malaria education in schools as they have been closed down to reduce the spread of the pandemic.

Malaria remains one of the top ten killers of children under five years and pregnant women in our communities. Sadly, much attention is not being given to the current spike in malaria cases as it has been relegated to the background. Most cases have been turned back from our hospitals due to the fear of the symptoms similar to COVID 19 and the hospitals that do admit these patients are currently over worked with few personnel.

In order to prevent and reduce the recent high rate of malaria cases in our rural communities in Kano, we at Serendipity have increased our distribution of Insecticide Treated Nets to women and children. We distributed 10 Insecticide Treated nets and crates of eggs to women in Ungogo Local Government Area in Kano as palliatives. Malaria Education was taught to the women on how to effectively use the ITNs, the duration of use of these ITNs, when to change them for new ones and the benefits of eating eggs to the body in building immunity.

During this period also, the rains have come up with floods that have devastated and displaced some communities in Bunkure area of Kano, thus we went to the community and distributed 20 Insecticide Treated Nets to the displaced persons through the district head.

We intend to continue with our #Without Malaria campaign to more communities in Ungogo Local Government Area in Kano but we can only achieve this through your continuous donations to provide ITNs to our communities. We hope to scale up our activities to distributing 500 ITNS to five more communities by the end of the year with your continued support in reducing malaria cases in rural communities of Northern Nigeria.

You can follow us on twitter @serendipityHea1, like our Facebook page on /serenhealthcare, LinkedIn/samirahfaruk or send us an email at serenhealthcare@gmail.com to know more about our work.

Best,

Samirah Faruk

Links:

• Without Malaria
• Without malaria

Dear Friends, Supporters and Family of Serendipity Healthcare Foundation,

As part of our resolve to ensure we have a malaria free environment in our communities in Kano; our strategy this past quarter was focused mainly on strengthening our surveillance through tracking of the number of cases of malaria infection in the communities we are working in. The method we used was survey forms given to the women in the community after having talks with them on home management of malaria with records from the community hospital.

We also embarked upon advocacy visits to the local governing council to get their committment to invest more in to the reduction of malaria by providing Insecticide Treated Nets for the communities.We have thus written to the local council head for us to partner with them on evaluating the impact we have thus far made in the distribution of the ITNs as well as the number of cases of malaria per community but as as at filing this report the local council is yet to get back to us on the partnership.

There were also ITNS that we redistributed to families in Burkiya, one of the communities worst affected with malaria cases. During the forth coming Malaria week of April 13-26, 2020, we intend to do more surveys to track the prevalence of the disease and the coverage of ITNs thus far, conduct malaria tests using the Rapid Diagnostic test kits and increase our advocacy to private companies to invest in reducing malaria where they are located as their corporate social responsibility.

We are aware that much more needs to be done to cover more communities and these are the ways to which we can reach out to these communities to evaluate work done thus far. This only possible through your kind donations and continued support to distribute more ITNs, increase our survellience mechanism, residual indoor spraying and rapid diagnostic test kits to test community members for malaria.

You can follow us on twitter @serendipityHea1, or like our facebook page/serenhealthcare or contact us via email on serenhealthcare@gmail.com to learn more about our work.

Best Regards,

Nmatullah Umar

Links:

• Malaria No more