2014 WWW AA Waterkeyn A

CONFERENCE: World Water Week

YEAR: 2014

PRESENTER: Anthony Waterkeyn, Co Founder of Africa AHEAD

TITLE: 5 x 5 Strategy: Scaling up Community Health Clubs

LINK: VIDEO 

PRESENTATION: 

This presentation by the co-Founder of Africa AHEAD traces the scale up of the CHC Model which six years ago was used primarily in small NGO Projects, typically within 20 to 200 villages  in Zimbabwe to the national Community Based Environmental Health Promotion Programme (CBEHPP) which is now responsible for operating community health clubs in virtually all of the 14,800 villages in Rwanda. He reflects how this came about due to the personal perception of the the Minister of Health in Rwanda at the time, Dr. Richard Sezibera, who saw how this model could work to prevent disease and save millions that are being spent on curing disease which are entirely preventable. He describes how it is the personal experience of the CHC which enable opinion leaders to understand the power of the model. An example was a delegation form DRC who visited a Rwandan villages and immediately were convinced of the efficacy of the CHC when they saw the home of an elderly CHC member which conformed to all recommended practices.  Similarly when a Gates Foundation delegation visited the CHC they decided to back a  Randomised Control Trial to ascertain if the claims by Africa AHEAD could really be true. The finding will be available next year and if positive will show that the CHC Model really is a means of achieving hygiene behaviour change at scale by going through the Ministry of Health and instigating it as a national programme.