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Health Care is a key to progress – to ensuring human dignity
and security. We build and equip clinics and support their operation,
run HIV/AIDS awareness programmes, provide health care and counselling,
and help provide access to clean water.
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Primary Health Care 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 health care. 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 support
staff – and the upgrading of existing, but inadequate primary
health care clinics.
In most of Africa Foundation’s communities 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 in place.
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 health care in the area have dramatically improved. Before the
building of Mduku Clinic, the only access to health care 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.
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“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
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 The
two-roomed Ololosokwan Clinic, which was
built in 1999, 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 Maasai communities
with a population of about 10,000 people.
Africa Foundation, in partnership with CC Africa and the Ololosokwan
community, are working with the government to expand the clinic
to provide basic health care, family planning and AIDS awareness
to the community. 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. This clinic currently
consists of two rooms (a consulting room and an office).
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 Access
To Water
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 havesting)
– Africa Foundation has been involved in providing guttering
and rainwater tanks, taps, water pumps and windmills, affording numerous
communities access to drinking water.
Rain water harvesting has long been recognised as a viable and cost-effective
means of accessing water for rural communities. Africa Foundation
has been involved with the installation of approximately thirty water
tanks and guttering in at least seven 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 3,300
Hippo Water Rollers have been distributed in ten communities.
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