FOR $10 HELP HEALTH SYSTEMS RESILIENCE TO CLIMATE

250 people have benefited from the screening of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) in the last six months. Kigezi Healthcare Foundation allocates one week every month to screen people from poor urban settings for non-communicable diseases. This majorly focuses on Diabetes, High blood pressure, cervical cancer breast cancer and prostate cancer. The urban poor in Uganda face challenges combating non-communicable diseases (NCDs) due to poor access to healthcare, financial barriers, limited health education, and environmental factors. They experience understaffed public clinics with limited hours and user fees at private facilities that are unaffordable, compounded by transport issues and a lack of essential medicines. 

Rapid urbanization in Africa has been linked to the growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Urbanization processes have amplified lifestyle risk factors for NCDs (including unhealthy diets, tobacco use, harmful alcohol intake, and physical inactivity), especially among individuals of low and middle social economic status. Nevertheless, African countries are not keeping pace with the ever-increasing need for population-level interventions such as health promotion through education, screening, diagnosis, and treatment, as well as structural measures such as policies and legislation to prevent and control the upstream factors driving the NCD epidemic. There are inadequate policies to specifically target the urban poor populations. The public health facilities have shortages of human resource and medical supplies. Most of the people from the urban poor communities are diagnosed late with cancer and can not afford expensive medications for hypertension and Diabetes. Kigezi Healthcare Foundation offers free screening for Non Communicable diseases and free medication to these vulnerable communities once every month for a whole week.

Many people have been cut off from accessing conventional healthcare due to torrential rains cutting off roads and bridges. Kigezi Healthcare Foundation has adopted mobile clinics to reach out to the underserved communities. Many mothers deliver at home or with the help of traditional birth attendants that poses a vey high risk of maternal deaths. Children have no access to immunization that is critical to prevent childhood diseases.

Climate change is increasingly recognized as one of the most critical global health challenges of the 21st century across the world. In Uganda, the effects of climate change are being felt across various sectors, but the healthcare system has been particularly impacted. Kigezi Healthcare Foundation explores how climate change is affecting healthcare in Uganda, the challenges the country faces, and possible strategies to overcome these hurdles mainly using mobile clinics to help the rural communities to have access to the much needed Healthcare. Over 1200 people have been reached using this innovative approach and the effort is going on with support from friends with the help of GlobalGiving donation platform.

Uganda is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to its reliance on rain-fed agriculture, limited adaptive capacity, and high poverty rates. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall patterns, extreme weather events like floods and droughts, and the increased spread of diseases such as malaria are overwhelming an already strained healthcare system. As these climatic shifts intensify, Ugandans—particularly those in rural and impoverished communities—are disproportionately affected Much of the intervention has to target the rural communities severely affected by the changes.