Religious, Traditional Leaders to Play Key Role in Eradicating Malaria, Says ACOMIN
Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja
As Nigeria seeks better ways to address the malaria scourge, the Civil Society in Malaria Control, Immunization and Nutrition (ACOMIN), a key player in the malaria elimination effort, said it is implementing a collaborative programme with religious and traditional institutions to ensure the its message gets to people.
ACOMIN said that since malaria has been identified as a community-based disease, it makes sense for government to tailor efforts at its eradication towards the people living in various communities.
Speaking to THISDAY shortly after the Quarterly Advocacy-Focused Media Dissemination Meeting of the group last Friday, ACOMIN National Coordinator Ayo Ipinmoye said religious institutions and community leaders can be immense value if they join in spreading key messages meant to keep our environment safe from mosquitoes.
His words: “We are currently advocating a whole society approach to tackling malaria scourge. Everyone has a role to play and everyone’s role is important and should be accentuated.
“Prior to this time, we had treated malaria as an issue for the medical community but experience has shown us that the medical community alone cannot resolve this problem.
“We have to understand that malaria is a community-based disease, all of the breeding sites are in the communities. It is in the communities that people have slept under mango trees and are bitten by mosquitoes and malaria is transmitted.
“It is in the community that they are treated with whatever means either “Agbo” or at the nearby healthcare centres. So if we must eliminate malaria, communities have for o play a primary role while other segments like the government, health professionals and media do theirs as well.”
Ipinmoye said that in the present campaign against malaria, the mass media is expected to play a very crucial role in bringing everybody together.
According to him, Nigeria has all it takes to conquer the scourge of malaria, adding the withdrawal of funding support by United States may be a blessing in disguise.
“Before now, we were waiting for donor countries to do for us what we can do for ourselves. Thank God we are waking up. We have what it takes and we just have to coordinate ourselves better. Prio to this time, we always ask for political will but my believe is that what we need to have more is a community will.
|The communities have to awake and demand and participate in determining their own health outcomes,” he noted.
He said the country needs to take advantage of all the interventions going on in the areas of rehabilitation of health facilities, building of boreholes and manpower trainings in the health sector to accentuate the campaign for better health outcomes.
Disease epidemiologist, Dr. Adeogun Adedapo, spoke of a new strategy known as Lava Sourcing which is aimed at identifying and eliminating mosquito breeding sites.
He said that through this means, communities can eliminate these mosquitoes themselves, just by doing simple things of keeping their environment free of mosquito.
“The context of lava source management has to be owned by the communities, and this leads the communities to play a central role in eliminating mosquito breeding sites, because that is the only portion of it that can be sustained every time.
“For instance, we do sanitation in communities already, then we want to build on that sanitation with the consciousness of eliminating mosquito breeding sites
“And that is what we are driving towards right now, and that’s why we educate people more. We ensure that people incorporate some of these things into what they are doing normally.
“I think at the end of the day, with the with the way our Lava source management is going now. Like I said, we’re all learning. The researchers are learning, the civil societies are learning.
“We’re beginning to see certain things differently, and then we’re coming to the understanding of certain things and the reason why we need to do them. So once we show the communities the reason why they need to do something, and they do them, and they see difference in their lives,” he said.
ACOMIN has been engaged by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to implement the Community-Led Monitoring and Civil Society Coordination Components of the ongoing GC7 GF grant.
The group is working with States, LGAs and community-level partners to ensure that relevant stakeholders are delivering on their stated responsibilities and achieving expected results in the fight against malaria and other ATM diseases
