Protecting Malawi's Health Workers with PPE

PROTECTING MALAWI'S HEALTH WORKERS WITH PPE

*** UPDATE ***

23rd April 2020.  It has been extremely heartening for us and our graduate health workers that we have reached our stretch target of £8000!  Thank you so much to all the generous supporters who have already donated.  

Now we are working on Phase 2 of the project - we would like to give all of our graduates (126 of them) a modest allowance of £20 each - therefore we need to raise a further £2500 (£10,500 in total).  This allowance will enable our graduates to replace items such as soap, hand sanitiser, gloves and masks from their PPE packs when they need to.  

With prices rising in Malawi, this allowance will ensure they have the resources to cover these replacements.  So we need 126 more supporters to donate £20 so we can provide this!  All donations from this point will cover these allowances.  Thank you for your support!

WHO ARE WE?

Medic to Medic have been working in Malawi for over 10 years.  Our charity supports disadvantaged students training as health workers by providing scholarships to cover tuition fees, medical equipment and books. Malawi has a huge need for more clinicians with <0.1 doctors and 0.3 nurse/midwives per 1000 people (Unicef 2015). We currently support over 60 students and have over 120 graduate alumni staffing Malawi's government hospitals and clinics.  Malawi has an average GDP per capita of US$349.9.  It is one of the poorest countries in the world.

The importance of human resources for health are now more than ever before being recognised as essential against death and disease.  They are SO important and even more so within sub-saharan Africa where there are simply not enough during the best of times, let alone the worst of times.  

OUR CAMPAIGN

Monies raised from our crowdfunding campaign will help us to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) to our graduate community, so that they can protect themselves during the covid-19 pandemic on the frontline in Malawi.  If our campaign exceeds our target, we will commission more PPE to be made which will be distributed through our graduates to Malawi's government facilities.

HOW WILL WE DO IT?

We will be working with local tailors to sustainably produce scrubs, surgical gowns, masks, hats and visors.  We will purchase soap from local street vendors.  This means we will be investing in the local community to ensure that local people can also benefit from this initiative and protect their incomes for a little bit longer.  This method ensures that we can get to work straight away, rather than buying internationally and expecting shipments during a time where there are global shortages.  It also means our initiative will not divert PPE from other countries. Our graduate community will organise the logistics of distribution and we have representatives throughout the country to ensure the PPE gets to where it needs to go.

MALAWI AND COVID-19 

Some of the world's best health systems have been beyond stretched by this pandemic.  This begs the question how some of the world's most fragile health systems will defend themselves against Covid-19, where basic principles of disease prevention are not possible.  When you don't have money to buy food, how will you afford to buy soap? When malaria, TB and overcrowding are common place, how can you avoid people with a fever and cough?  When it is not uncommon for shortages of drugs and equipment, how will health workers be protected? 

We need to protect the health workers staffing fragile health systems.  Without them, the impact on ongoing infectious disease epidemics with disruption in HIV, TB, malaria programmes (to name but a few) will be devastating and have lasting consequences which will affect everyone.  When the developed world comes out of their pandemic, it will be easy to forget that the developing world will only just be entering theirs.

DONATIONS

Anything you are able to give would be greatly appreciated.  Donations in different currencies (NZ$, US$, AU$, Euros) can be made on our website: www.medictomedic.org.uk - please specify in the free text donation box that you wish your donation to go towards the PPE emergency appeal.

For those in Malawi wanting to make a donation, please message us for our local bank account details so you are able to donate in Malawi Kwacha.  Our email address is [email protected]