Behaviour Change
Every Club for Mothers chooses a name for itself, which must be approved by the Red Cross. In Djangou (Savanes Region), the club chose to call itself ‘Monlebde’ which means ‘change of attitude’.
In all of these clubs, the most important change has been the awareness that malaria is a disease brought by mosquitoes, and not the result of witchcraft.
In most of the educational dramas performed by local drama groups, you can see a father running to the sorcerer with his sick child and asking him to banish the curse. And then there will be an argument with his wife, or with better informed neighbours. The message is that sorcery does not work. But when they go to the Health Centre, that does work. And so then the family adopts all the good prevention practices.
There has indeed been a change in attitude. An elderly women remembers, “Before, at five months of pregnancy, we did not go to the Health Centre. The husband would visit the sorcerer and we would sacrifice a hen to the ancestors to protect the foetus. Nowadays, mortality has gone down dramatically because women go for their ante-natal visits and use bednets. Thanks to the Club for Mothers, they now understand that the sorcerer does not cure malaria.”
And they decide to act. In Djangou, in the far north of the country, the Action Plan of the Club for Mothers states what they will do in November: home visits to encourage people to dig a cesspool sink to drain waste water; provide information on the right way to set up bednets; follow up on the effective use of the bednets; information and counseling meetings for pregnant women.
Adelassissi Aremu, Regional Red Cross Coordinator for the Savanes Region, bases his activities around the Clubs for Mothers. “The Red Cross is present in nearly all 400 villages of this region. This means that there are 16,000 women with whom we are building a real force in society.
As soon as a club is created and approved by the Red Cross, the members carry out their Self Assessment on malaria. “This tool is very important,” says Adelassissi Aremu. It starts the discussion. It encourages women to talk. And then, they take ownership of the information about malaria and start to act. And when a woman says, Yes, she acts! We would never have been able to get such results with men.”
In Aloukpabountou (Central Region), these dynamic women take along the whole community. On their Action Plan for October to December 2008 that they present us, we read the following :
- Destroy breeding sites for mosquitoes
- Clean the wells
- Put in new insecticide treated bednets
- Clean around the houses.
- Dig cesspool sinks.
“The whole community takes part in this,” chief Kola assures us. “At the end of October all that was left to do was to dig the cesspool sinks.”