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Latest News Meet solomon village health team volunteer

Meet Solomon, Village Health Team Volunteer

12 March 2012

In Uganda, Malaria Consortium has trained over 7,000 Village Health Team (VHT) volunteers. Solomon Spaya is one of them.

Solomon is 37 years old and lives in Kinogozi West Village, Western Uganda, with his wife Joanna and their two children, Apollo (9) and Jovan (5). Malaria Consortium trained Solomon in Integrated Community Care Management (ICCM) of childhood diarrhoea, pneumonia and malaria, using guidelines and job aids developed in cooperation with the Ministry of Health. Solomon is now providing diagnosis, drugs and / or referral for the sick children in his village.

The inSCALE project is looking into innovative ways to increase motivation and supervision of community health workers like Solomon, and at the same time advocates for the scale-up of community health workers programs, which hold the potential of reducing of over 60% the number of deaths of children under five every year.

“The number of deaths in children under five has gone down a lot. I know this, because as a Parish Coordinator I always hear what is going on in the community. I would hear that such and such child had died, or listen to the radio announcements and find out that this woman’s baby had died,” says Solomon. “At least one child would die from malaria every month. These days, we bury our old men, not our children”.

 

Watch the slideshow about Solomons’ life as VHT here

For more information, contact [email protected]

 

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