In 2018, SolHealth partnered with the UB-ONE Foundation and The Gambia Red Cross Society to collaborate on a comprehensive healthcare revitalization project in rural Gambia.
With the endorsement of the Gambian Ministry of Health, the project launched in February 2019 in the two most remote regions of the country - the Upper River Region and Central River Region. The last several years have seen tremendous successes in the communities we have reached through the program. To date, we have achieved the following results:
- construction of 5 solar-powered borehole wells in the rural villages of Touba Wouli, Tankongkunda, Sarenyakah, Koronumu Kunda and Jawo Kunda which together provide clean drinking water to over 8,000 rural Gambians.
- construction of 5 composting latrines in the rural villages of Fatako, Musanding Kunda, Sare Giddeh, Tenegfara and Amdalie which together service approximately 600 rural Gambians. This will help combat the widespread practice of open defecation which leads to numerous preventable infectious diseases.
- training of two cohort of community health nurses (65 total) at a local school. The first cohort graduated with the highest grades the school has ever seen and both cohorts of newly-qualified nurses have been deployed to rural postings.
- a comprehensive health behavior change campaign through which over 25,000 rural Gambians across 168 villages learned simple but life-changing sanitation practices that also helped stem the spread of Covid-19.
With these successes, we are now focused on expanding the reach of these interventions and broadening our impact:
- four more borehole wells, providing access to clean water for 12,000 more citizens.
- incentivization packages for our sponsored community health nurses to encourage them to remain in challenging rural posts and help combat high attrition rates among the rural nurse workforce.
