By Menaka Dhingra and Nicole Dussault | Co-Presidents of GlobeMed at Columbia
Dear family and friends,
Summer is almost over and the GlobeMed at Columbia team is getting ready to start the new year! We have some exciting updates from GWED-G and are getting ready to unveil our new proejct for 2013-2014. We can't wait to start a new semester of fundraising and awareness campaigns, and we hope you will continue to follow our activities and support us as wonderfully as you have in the past.
Our Grassroots On Site Work team wrapped up their activities in Gulu, Uganda at the end of June and have spent the past few months preparing the media and stories collected from the field to share with you all. Look forward to stories from our beneficiaries and new photos documenting field activities, as well as some interviews of the HIV positive mothers in our groups and some of the GWED-G staff as well! The team also helped design the new project for this year, which we will share with you all in the beginning of September. In the meantime, here is a brief summary of GWED-G's activities from their quarterly report.
Maternal Health
GWED-G's main goal for Maternal Health projects is to decrease the infant mortality rate, which has risen in the past years to 438 deaths per 100,000 live births. Despite the daunting challenges in achieving their target reduction, GWED-G has continued implementing awareness and treatment campaigns on the parish, community, and home level over the past few months. They have also continued their work with maternal health and family planning as well as ANC and PMTCT care.
A second strategy towards reducing the infant mortality rate that GWED-G has been using is engagement with local officials. GWED-G is working with District Health Officers and VHTs to ensure that health facilities and existing government health stuctures are being properly and fully utilized. They have also been advocating for educational campaigns for children, which will serve as a preventative measure against the spread of HIV/AIDS and will facilitate proper family planning.
GWED-G has also been trying their best to ensure that all the mothers our project is responsible for are receiving proper antenatal care. However, transportation to health centers is proving to be an issue for many of the women. Some of the women's husbands refuse to take them for treatment, and they cannot afford to hire a motorcycle taxi to take them. GWED-G will be working with GlobeMed in our new project to address issues such as these. On a brighter note, 30 of the mothers received safe birth kits which will allow them to have HIV negative babies.
VHT Activities
The GROW team was able to see the VHTs' work while in Uganda, as well as distribute the incentives promised to them by our project. The VHTs received soap and sugar as well as bicycles while the GROW team was on site. They were also invited to a planning meeting where they were able to discuss training strategies as well as some of the challenges that they face in their daily work, such as transportation and lack of official materials to distribute to the community (i.e. informational pamphlets, flyers, etc.).
You can read about the rest of the activities conducted by GWED-G this quarter in the attached report, including blood screenings for HIV and GBV awareness and sensitization sessions. We will be revealing our new project within the next few weeks; we can't wait for you all to see what GWED-G and GlobeMed at Columbia have planned for the new year!
In the meantime, stay happy and healthy!
GlobeMed at Columbia
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