End Malaria in Children of Rural communities, Kano

Dear Supporters, Family and Friends of Serendipity Healthcare Foundation,

With the state of emergency declared on Malaria in Nigeria by the current president due to the high rate of deaths amongst children under five standing at 5 per 10 cases, we at Serendipity have been working assiduously to ensure that the rate of malaria related cases in our rural communities are reduced.

We realized that our campaigns of providing Insecticide Treated Nets and first line treatments though useful was not doing enough to reduce malaria thus realizing that we were doing it all wrong and failing as there was an underlying causal effect that we were not tackling. We had several stakeholders meeting with the women groups and traditional heads where we found out that lack of environmental sanitation, cleanliness of surroundings and knowledge of the signs and symptoms of malaria and of course lack of a functional healthcare facility that was close by were the major factor    We have been working on malaria interventions in five rural communities of two local governing councils in Kano, Nigeria since 2014. In the over two years of community-based education initiatives on home management of malaria, and with extensive community feedback, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to fail and learn from our mistakes, this is one of such mistakes which we realized that the best way is to change our strategy hence we came up with PES campaign which is Prevention, Elimination and Surveillance.

This campaign is a two pronged approach where we embarked on advocacy to the local governing councils to pick up the waste and refuse from the communities to reduce the prevalence of these malaria vectors and to embark upon indoor residual spraying. Our second approach is providing Insecticide Treated Nets and follows up on percentage usage, rapid diagnostic testing and distribution of first line treatments. We realized also that the healthcare systems in place are inadequate with weak distribution channels thus there is an urgent need for a stronger survilience for an effective and timely response to these communities that are endemic, to prevent outbreaks and resurgence of malaria.

We have thus far covered three communities with a total population of 1050 persons given Insecticide Treated Nets, tested women and children using our Rapid Diagnostic test kits and first line treatments given to those found with malaria parasite in their system; now need your assistance to cover additional two communities before the end of next quarter in order to meet our target of reducing malaria in our rural communities.

Through your kind donations, we have been able to achieve all of this and hope to scale up our activities with your continued support, kind words and donations in ending malaria in rural communities in Kano, 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.

Also check out our website on www.serendipityhealthcare.ngo

Thank you,

Fatima Lawani

Links:

• PES Campaign

Dear Family, Friends and Supporters of Serendipity Healthcare Family,

The fight to stop the spread of yellow fever is ongoing as we are not our of the woods yet. There was two reported cases of yellow fever in Yar Kuje of Ungogo Local Governing Councils, one of the communities were we worked and thus we took our campaign advocacy to the community.

We had a focus group discussion with the women group and the children on identification of the signs and symptoms of yellow fever and malaria. It was a fruitful discussion as prior to now, they were not aware of the ailment until it occured within their community and as such could not do anything to prevent the death of those children.

The women leader Zaliha Barau in her own words expressed such great concern over the state of their community and promised to set up a team on sanitation enforcers to ensure breeding grounds for mosquitoes are not cultivated.

Habiba a sister to one of the victims said in the local language "ina matukar godiya akan talafi da a ka zo mana da shi yau kuma Allah SWT ya biya, ameen. Nafiu da yana da rai yau idan mun san duk wadan nan abubuwa. Mun gode"!! The translation means that she is happy with this new information about knowing the signs and symptoms of Malaria and wished they had this information earlier perhaps her brother Nafiu would be alive".

Rapid Diagnostic tests were conducted on children and women present and none of them had symptoms of malaria.

Through your support we are gaining grounds in our advocacy campaigns through radio and distribution of Insecticide Treated Nets to rural communities but much still needs to be done we are soliciting for your continuos support to reach more communities in our rural areas.

You can send us an email on serenhealthcare@gmail.com for further enquires, follow us on our Facebook page/serenhealthcare, LinkedIn/samirahfaruk and twitter @serendipityHea1 or give us a call on 2348035905524 to know how you can donate.

Thank you,

Fatima Lawani

Head, Fundraising

Links:

• Community Developement
• Curbing the fight on Yellow Fever