Speeches Shim
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) through its Office of Transition Initiatives is supporting training for women, mostly widowed or otherwise made vulnerable by the Boko Haram insurgency, to produce protective facemasks to help protect the population from the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria’s conflict-affected Northeast.
Despite several of her six children having fallen sick with malaria, some more than once, Philomena Edet had never owned a mosquito net. Philomena initially thought more about the disease economically. Frequent trips to the district health clinic to treat her children’s frequent bouts with malaria dipped painfully into income from her small business selling kerosene as cooking fuel.
The 14th Annual Report of the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), which will be released today in conjunction with World Malaria Day, indicates that child death rates have decreased in Nigeria by 16 percent since 2010 when the United States began providing malaria control support to the country. During the same period, malaria prevalence has decreased by almost half – from 42 percent in 2010 to 23 percent – according to Nigeria’s most recent National Demographic and Health Survey.
In Yobe and Borno states, two of the most severely impacted by the decade -long conflict with violent extremists Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa, USAID conducted sensitization training for 100 voluntary community mobilizers in each state as they prepare for a five-day, door-to-door awareness campaign to curb the spread of the virus.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is helping the Nigerian government provide critical information about how to avoid contracting COVID-19 to more than a million of its citizens a day. The nationwide awareness-raising campaign is part of a broader U.S. government support, with $6.7 million already pledged, to bolster Nigeria’s efforts to prevent and respond to the spread of the virus. USAID has teamed up with communications giant Airtel to deploy both Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and short message service (SMS) platforms to deliver key messages around social distancing, safe hygiene practices, and other preventive measures to contain the spread of the disease.
Comment
Make a general inquiry or suggest an improvement.