bed nets for everyone!

Here’s a little insight into what I’m up to at work these days...During her visit to Liberia, the German Chancellor committed to donating 300,000 mosquito nets to help the nation combat malaria around the country. German Agro Action is an NGO posted up in Liberia already and they have been tasked with the distribution of the nets. AYDAP is already a member of the Malaria Steering Committee run here by the Ministry of Health and has several trained staff and volunteers that worked to distribute bed nets/raise awareness earlier this year. So we were eager to show support to German Agro Action and express our interest in setting up a distribution in a couple areas that we have solid contacts. Monday we created all the documentation requested for the expression of interest, including proposed staffing needs and budget for distribution, logistics plan for the project, and information on AYDAP’s assets and experience. We submitted it all on Monday and will wait to here if they want our assistance come January-June when they aim to be distributing.

We won’t be working the entire 6 months on the project, only about 1 month; using multiple teams of volunteers our region for distribution would take only 1 week to distribute and then 1 week of follow-up to check for proper usage. The original approach through the Ministry of Health was to target outreach to pregnant women and children under 5, but it proved hard to track and monitor so the most recent plan (which all agencies distributing nets in Liberia are to use as a guideline) is 3 nets per household, based on statics that average homes in Liberia have 5 people in them. Our selected area will require just over 10,300 nets to be distributed and is in a county that no other NGOs have worked with or focused on so hopefully we’ll get picked up by German Agro Action to reach this community.