Empowering Through Healthcare

Healthcare is key to progress and to ensuring human dignity and security. We fund and facilitate the building and equipping of clinics and support their operation, run HIV/AIDs awareness programmes, provide healthcare and counselling, and help provide access to clean water.

Access to primary healthcare
Clean water - at the heart of healthcare

Africa Foundation supports initiatives to provide primary healthcare centres

Despite vast advances made in medicine over the past decades, many communities in rural Africa still do not have access to medical facilities and primary healthcare. Various factors such as poverty, malnutrition and unemployment all contribute to ill health. Africa Foundation assists by facilitating the building of clinics and accommodation for staff - and the upgrading of existing, but inadequate primary healthcare clinics.

In most of the communities Africa Foundation supports, there are government clinics which attempt to provide for the local people, but they are woefully under-equipped, resourced and maintained. Africa Foundation is committed to ensuring better facilities are put in place.

Dramatically improving community healthcare

The 24-hour Mduku Clinic in KwaZulu-Natal, was built in 1995 and attends to approximately 11,000 people in the region. It has a maternity ward and is linked to the Mseleni Hospital through the Zululand Flying Doctors service. The standards of healthcare in the area have dramatically improved. Before the building of Mduku Clinic, the only access to healthcare was through a mobile clinic that visited the area every two weeks, seeing an average of 600 patients a month. Today the clinic sees as many as 3,500 patients a month, as people no longer have to travel long distances and are therefore more willing to consult a medical expert.

"Most of the patients we see in a day are here for STDs or HIV/AIDS-related diseases. These people had nowhere to go before the Africa Foundation built the clinic."

Volunteer health worker, Mduku Clinic, KwaZulu-Natal

Bringing healthcare to remote communities

The ten-roomed Ololosokwan Clinic, which was renovated in 2008, is situated in the Ololosokwan Village in northern Tanzania. The nearest alternative clinic is 80km away without regular transport. The clinic attends to more than three Masai communities with a population of about 10,000 people.

Africa Foundation supports the & Beyond Foundation in its work partnering with the Ololosokwan community, and are working with the government to expand the clinic to provide basic healthcare, family planning and AIDS awareness programmes. The current clinic has only one doctor who works 13 hours a day and serves approximately 350 people per week, which increases to approximately 100 people per day during the rainy seasons due to malaria outbreaks, dysentery and pneumonia.

Clean Water - at the heart of healthcare

One of the worst daily hardships faced by many African rural communities is the extreme shortage of water. Many rural women and children in Africa walk over a kilometre every day to fetch water, returning home stooped under the backbreaking burden of their full water buckets, and sometimes repeating this trip several times per day. This task also impacts on all areas of the children's youth, specifically physically and educationally.

Water tanks and guttering (rain water harvesting)

Africa Foundation has been involved in providing guttering and rainwater tanks, taps, water pumps and windmills, affording numerous communities access to drinking water.

Rainwater harvesting has long been recognised as a viable and cost-effective means of accessing water for rural communities. Africa Foundation has been instrumental in the installation of approximately thirty water tanks and guttering in many communities. Water tanks raise awareness of the benefits of water collection in communities and individual households. The tanks provide water for school children and children do not have to miss school because they have to fetch water. Water tanks are sustainable and have a long life span.

Hippo Water Rollers

Hippo Water Rollers bring immediate relief to the water scarcity and transportation problems faced by so many rural communities. The innovative design of the Hippo Water Roller (like an old-fashioned drum lawn roller) makes the task of collecting water much easier, and far less time-consuming. The Rollers have a 90-litre capacity - a great improvement on the usual 5-litre containers carried on the head. To date, over 6000 Hippo Water Rollers have been distributed to rural families in ten communities.