Fighting Against Climate Change
Subtitle: Flooding and Malaria in South Sudan
Byline: By The MENTOR Initiative
Photo Credits: The MENTOR Initiative – South Sudan team
In late 2020, South Sudan experienced its most devastating floods in 60 years, with torrential rains and malaria ravaging several parts of the country. More than 1 million people across South Sudan were affected.
MENTOR and partners worked tirelessly to overcome challenges and deliver routine, life-saving activities to affected populations including 6 refugee camps, adjacent host communities, and a Protection of Civilian site.
Flood-related access challenges coupled with high levels of insecurity and resource constraints created a testing environment for our staff, forcing them to use boats to reach locations inaccessible by land.
In areas where flooding was less severe staff carried the Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) equipment, wading through water on foot to access hard-to-reach communities.
MENTOR empowers local community volunteers to deliver disease prevention campaigns, together with reinforcing local health workers' capacity for diagnostic and case management services for malaria and other vector-borne diseases (VBDs).
Despite the challenges of accessibility to displaced populations, local MENTOR staff delivered IRS activities in target locations, providing protection from VBDs to approximately 24,988 households and 195,542 beneficiaries.
Larviciding and fly-control activities were conducted, and across the 5 operational sites, a total of 50,877 breeding sites were treated for mosquito larvae and 36,867 sites for fly control.
Other delivered activities include health messaging and educational sessions reaching some 6,767 individuals.
MENTOR prides itself in ensuring uninterrupted delivery of medical services during emergencies. We provided 159,000 malaria RDTs, 14,100 treatment tablets, and 4,700 doses of Artesunate to health partners in the field, preventing stock-outs and disruption of health services during the floods.
Social Media Hashtags:
#ClimateChange #SouthSudan #Malaria #EndMalaria #VBDs #IRS #Refugees #HealthCare #CommunityHealthWorkers #CHWs
Links to more content:
https://www.thementorinitiative.org/delivering-malaria-control-activities-during-extreme-flooding-south-sudan/
https://www.thementorinitiative.org/category/south-sudan/
Contact information for follow-up questions:
Ben Willis – External Communications ben@mentor-initiative.net
Laura Paris – Operational Research & Programme Manager laura.paris@mentor-initiative.net
Sajid Kamal – South Sudan Country Director cd.southsudan@mentor-initiative.net