Objective: Sustainability
The same word comes up again and again in conversations with National Malaria Control Programme and NSGA facilitators and also in the WHO head office in Banjul : sustainability.
Everyone remembers short-lived information campaigns, public awareness programmes with no sustainability, health initiatives that come to a halt with the end of outside funding. And you can hear this sentence in West African countries, “Many assistance programmes are two years long. Then, the partner goes back to their country. But the mosquitoes remain!”
“Our main concern is the sustainability of the struggle against malaria,” stresses Dr Thomas Sukwa, WHO representative in The Gambia. “This is the reason why we run awareness campaigns directed at the children, the youngsters. In this way, we hope to have, in the near future, a generation of young adults with real Malaria Competence, a generation that will be able to go on, by itself, with prevention and care.”
This generation has already started to do that in Maka Farafenni. During the night of the film show, after the great performance of the local drama group, Lamin Fatty, one of the NSGA facilitators was delighted. He said, “The last time we visited this community was in March. Nine months ago! And you can see how deeply they have come to own the information about malaria and how they invent their own way to get the messages to the community.”
NSGA Programme Director Kevin Hughes, insists, “We do not want to build a culture of dependency. On the contrary, we want the communities to take ownership of the necessary competence to make malaria roll back. And this is where the power of Self Assessment stands: ownership.”
Mrs Adama Jagne Sonko, Deputy Programme Manager in the National Malaria Control Programme is confident that if resources are continuously available to scale up interventions and to consolidate the gains then, “The Gambia will have the capacity to control malaria. And we will move towards pre-elimination. Our target for 2010 is pre-elimination, and then elimination.”
More funding will have to be mobilised to scale up the approach to cover the whole country, but the Gambians are confident.
And as he was bidding us goodbye, WHO Dr Thomas Sukwa, called out to us, “We will roll back malaria to the ocean!”