Horn of Africa

Drought is again wreaking havoc in the Horn of Africa on a scale unseen for many years, this time, with millions of people suffering. The MENTOR Initiative is working with agencies, authorities and partners in Northern Kenya and Somalia to help ensure that everyone is prepared in case this drought leads to epidemics of malaria and other vector borne diseases.

History tells us that these devastating droughts are all too often followed by equally devastating floods. These floods not only wash away people's homes and livelihoods but also produce all the ingredients for an epidemic of malaria. These epidemics are especially damaging as people, already weakened by displacement and malnutrition have little or no immunity to malaria. Although malaria is both preventable and treatable, when an epidemic strikes and many people become sick at once, the few health facilities there are, fast become over-burdened and run out of essential stocks for diagnosis and treatment meaning people can die unnecessarily.

The MENTOR Initiative first responded to this pattern of events in 2007 when the Tana River in North Eastern Province burst its banks, displacing over 200,000 people across the region and washing away an entire section of the Dadaab refugee camp. We have been in the area ever since conducting Indoor Residual Spraying in people's homes to prevent malaria, supporting the distribution of mosquito nets and establishing accurate diagnosis and treatment of malaria cases at health facilities and working with both nomadic and settled communities to find the best solution for them, to control malaria. Training has been a major element of this work, we have trained community spray teams and equipped them in their communities to respond with spraying campaigns if needed and given additional training and on-the-job support to health facility workers and community health workers to ensure people can access accurate malaria diagnosis and treatment as soon as fever develops. Critically, we have also been supporting health workers to identify when a fever is not malaria and what this cause of fever could be. Not only does this enable the sick person to receive the appropriate treatment but also saves money on expensive malaria drugs. Significantly this also helps us identify and measure a malaria epidemic.

Since last year, with the help of Comic Relief we have been working to install and build an ARGOS Malaria Epidemic Early Warning system to ensure that epidemics are identified and responded to in days and weeks instead of weeks and months. These simple, single purpose, battery operated computers collect essential data on the number of patients diagnosed and treated at health facility by age group, and the stocks of essential drugs. This information is automatically transmitted via satellite and the data analysed, alerting Ministry of Health and partners when there are peaks in positive malaria diagnosis which may signal the start of an epidemic. We also work very closely with KEMSA, Kenyan Ministry of Health Logistics, to improve supply chain management of stocks to ensure health facilities in the area have the Rapid Diagnostic Tests and drugs they need. For more information on this project please see the country page.

The MENTOR Initiative has been active in Somalia for the last two years where we are the lead agency for UNICEF and the Global Fund for malaria emergency preparedness and response. What this means is that we are in close contact with a large network of partners including, national and international NGOs, Ministry of Health and UN agencies, we train their staff in how to plan for, identify and respond to malaria emergencies and provide technical support for them, upon request, throughout their response activities.

If required we will respond ourselves from our base in North Kenya to provide Indoor Residual Spraying Campaigns and support malaria treatment and diagnosis in affected communities.

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