Many communities in rural Africa lack healthcare enough to cope with disease transmission. Aside from AIDS, malaria and measles, it is often the ones that we see as fairly normal in developed countries that cause the biggest problems in rural Africa. Diarrhoea, for example, is the greatest cause of child mortality in Africa and constitutes one in nine child deaths worldwide. The lack of simple healthcare in villages can, very often, mean the difference between life and death.
Borana, a lodge very close to JbD’s heart, runs a mobile medical clinic that services remote communities with otherwise no access to the equipment they need. Added to this, the nurses of the clinic deliver lectures on health and sex education to pupils of five different schools and give immunisations. One of the main aims of the clinic is to spread awareness about AIDS and family planning.
I read the account of a final year medical student and the time spent working for the clinic, who described it as ‘rural medicine at its best’. The placement involved everything from teaching and raising awareness to deworming, immunising, HIV screening and treating cases of malaria. The clinic provides a remarkable service for those that just couldn’t get to a hospital otherwise.
In the last 10 years Journeys by Design has donated £811,827 to African medical and healthcare in one way or another (direct donation, client donation, auctioned safaris that we’ve donated or match funding). I mention it not to draw attention to JbD, but rather to illustrate the potential for raising significant sums of money for ventures like this.
Indeed, it’s this that forms the first-phase basis of Wild Philanthropy (our sister charity), which uses charitably raised income to distribute into projects that we are more proactively taking part in. WP currently holds a partnership with Borana and the land surrounding to help fund projects such as these. If you are interested in the work of the Borana Medical clinic, then do get in touch with Wild Philanthropy – we’d love to organise a trip there for you.