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Health
Community / The New Forests Company
One of the most pressing primary health challenges identified in the participatory rural appraisal was lack of access to clean water and poor sanitation. The water tables in the areas where NFC works are relatively complicated. NFC decided to take this very seriously and spend much of the first few years concentrating in these areas of health.
NFC has since branched out into the other prioritized areas of HIV/AIDS and immunisations. It also plans to move into TB/Malaria and family planning interventions and sanitation campaigns this year. NFC is currently discussing with health organizations in Uganda to explore partnership opportunities to maximize the impact of its interventions.
Projects
Shallow Wells
NFC has constructed and protected four shallow wells around its Namwasa Plantation. The water situation is very bad in that area, and people are forced to buy jerry cans of water during the dry season or use water from the area where others are washing trucks. These projects have been largely successful in both decreasing time spent fetching water and anecdotally decreasing incidence of water born diseases. This is extremely important because of the large number of children in particular in Uganda who die of simple, preventable water born disease every year.
These projects are also community partnerships where the community contributes the land and the local materials and unskilled labor and NFC provides the technical expertise and tools and materials that are very hard to access locally.
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| Picture of unprotected water source (before) |
Well Pic (after) |
Water Tanks
Rain water harvesting in widely considered one of the cleanest models for safe drinking water. However, it is only viable when there is a large roof from which the rain can be harvested. Luckily on NFC’s classroom blocks, there is ample roof space, so adding on an extra water tank for rain harvesting is easy. To date NFC has contributed three water tanks at Umea Primary School, Ddalamba Primary School and the New Hope Day Care Centre. These are all being very well maintained and used as the main source of water for the school or day care centre. The teachers have reported decreases in time spent fetching water as well as incidences of water borne diseases among pupils. NFC intends to continue doing more projects like these in the local schools.
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| Day Care Centre Water Tank |
Umea Water Tank |
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| Ddalamba Water Tank |
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Pit Latrines
Unfortunately, the schools in Uganda are often ill-equipped in the area of sanitation as well. Neither the day care centre nor Ddalamba pit latrines had adequate sanitation facilities, and therfore NFC invested in these alongside the construction projects. The teachers also reported that these have both decreased on absenteeism due to illness and opened up the eyes of the pupils to the importance of sanitation.
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| Ddalamba Pit Latrine |
Day Care Centre Pit Latrine |
HIV/AIDS Awareness and Volunteer Counselling and Testing
While Uganda is widely considered an HIV/AIDS success story due to their implementation of a countrywide A B C behavioural change campaign in the 1990s, spearheaded by His Excellency, President Museveni. The infection rates dropped from over thirty percent of the population to less than ten percent within less than a decade. However, Uganda’s HIV/AIDS rate is still hovering around 7.5% and remains a problem across the country. Therefore, NFC has taken it on to provide HIV/AIDS awareness to its labourers and the surrounding communities once a quarter in collaboration with a local organization who provides these services. The labourers and community members have both expressed strong support of this project and have pledged to bring more people to each session. In the last session undertaken, of the 62 people who were tested, 2 people tested positive. While this is relatively low, in a population with an income who are working together on a daily basis, the number of positive people threatens to grow if the right precautions are not taken against it.
Immunisation Campaign Support
Through its field research into the challenges of the local public health systems in Uganda, NFC realized that the local public health centres were fairly well equipped with vaccines and refrigeration services. However, the public health workers were not well facilitated to travel to their immunisation outreach centres. This meant that many of the vaccinations were getting spoiled without being used, while many children were left unvaccinated. NFC partnered with the health centres and local government administrations to provide two bicycles to each health centre to assist in the immunization outreaches. The health workers and local government were very excited about this intervention and will be giving NFC reports of their immunisation efforts from which NFC will be able to calculate what impact this intervention has had on the number of children immunized.
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| Bicycle giveaway ceremony |
Bicycle giveaway ceremony |
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| Immunisation session |
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Our current projects are:
