Revisiting our grassroots Citizens Lead COVID 19 Prevention partnership
The unfortunate shock brought by the COVID 19 pandemic increasingly posed a serious threat to our communities and people. We brought a new hope and compassion to our communities by accompanying grassroots citizens to take full ownership of the COVID 19 intervention including, awareness raising, prevention, and care. Our project “Health beyond COVID 19 through a community based approach” received technical and financial support from PROCIVIS (11th European Development Fund) .Through this project we reached out to communities in 7 council areas. NWADO Led a group of 7 organizations for an intensive training with the PROCIVIS project management unit on COVID 19 and management. These organizations then intervened in their localities reaching out to more than 20 000 persons through awareness, education and distribution of Covid 19 prevention kids to the populations. We are proud of the remarkable footprint left by our members in local communities. Today we are revisiting our community partnerships to understand what stride we made. Here is what our grassroots leaders had to say.
Testimonies on the project
Nsobati women group leader Santa: “NWADO did not only help us on the preventing covid 19, enable us and our children to cultivate and maintain hygienic practices which we have adopted till date as a way of life? In our meeting houses we no longer share drinking cups; we also have a bucket outside where everyone washes their hands before because just by exchanging banknotes we have to wash our hands clean before sharing our kola nuts ”
Quarter head Tubah: “For me it was NWADO’s approach that impressed me, first we were being instructed to keep barrier measures, but NWADO’s approach empowered and orientated us to own and lead the process by ourselves without anyone having to tell us what to do. In their community meetings the facilitators highlighted bad practices that could make us contract not only COVID 19 but other communicable diseases. That is why we still practice maintain many of the hygienic practices inspite the fact that we no longer hear much about the pandemic, This help us and our families to avoid many other illnesses.
Our key lesson here is that our community partnership approach is proving a winning model for us. This approach goes beyond looking as community members as passive beneficiaries of programs but place them at the centre of solution. We will like to give special thanks to the following organisations NWADO for their efforts in leading this action. These members and collaborators are CODEF, HARMOPHY, BARUDWO ,MANVOCAM, OWED, RERSOD and CEDID.
