Somalia Young Doctors Association (SOYDA) was among the selected partners to implemented integrated response on Health, WASH, Education, Nutrition and Food security interventions in Afgooye corridors to enable accelerate the pre-famine life-saving intervention in Afgooye district. The project aims reducing morbidity through integrated package of education, food security, and WASH, health and nutrition interventions. The project activities are linked across Education, Food Security, health, nutrition WASH activities for maximum synergies and sustainable impacts in the following manner:
Health: Emphasis will be on maternal, neonatal and child health including emergency immunization to the host communities and IDPs as well as treatment of severe acute malnutrition, building the capacity of health workers through training on integrated management of acute illness IMCI, Cholera/measles case management and community case management CCM will be done to equip health workers with the required skills to deliver quality healthcare services. Also 500 school going children will be screened of AWD/cholera, measles and malnutrition and provided appropriate treatment through health and nutrition services
Nutrition: Capacity building of nutrition staff on IMAM/IYCF services, infants young child feeding best practices (IYCF), as well as conduct caregivers infant and young child feeding practices, IYCF promotion session for better information dissemination to the caregivers in the project area. Referral of malnourished children with complicated cases will be done to the Outpatient Therapeutic Programme integrated with primary health care services managed by SOYDA and other actors in Afgooye corridor
WASH: WASH services will be improved through conducting comprehensive hygiene promotion activities, hygiene kits, increasing access to sustainable safe water and sanitation facilities to the IDPs and schools.
Food security: The drought affected IDPs with malnourished children aged under 5 years and households with school aged children and ready to enroll their children to the schools will be provided food vouchers for 3 months successively to enhance their food security status, prevent relapse upon treatment of malnutrition and increase children going to school.
Education: SOYDA will support to functional school to absorb 200 IDP children (the school will be at two shifts, morning and afternoon) through provision of teaching/learning materials and emergency teaching incentives. To increase school-aged children to go to school, SOYDA will provide school feeding to 500 children (200 new children and 300 children at the school) shared equally boys and girls to attract parents to allow their children to schools, avoid malnutrition among the children and prevent excess dropouts. In addition to that SOYDA will employ 10 volunteers (5 men and 5 women) from the IDPs to sensitize and mobilize the IDP parents to enroll their children particularly girls to the schools through visiting house-to-house, community gathering squares and mosques. Mitigating drought and AWD/Cholera outbreak SOYDA will screen and treat as well as treatment of measles and other vaccine preventable illnesses & malnutrition among children before they go to schools.
Through this project, Food Security, health, WASH, Nutrition and Education activities will be integrated in the sense that under five children boys, girls admitted at the OTP sites will be immunized against measles and other communicable disease and as well the SAM complicated cases referred to the stabilization centers for proper medical treatment, also malnourished children aged under 5 years and households with school aged children and ready to enroll their children to the schools will be provided food vouchers for 3 months successively to enhance their food security status, prevent relapse upon treatment of malnutrition and increase children going to school, on the same note the mothers visiting ANC/PNC at the mobile clinic will be provided both NHHP/IYCF-E and shall be integrated with hygiene promotions activities such as hand washing practices as well as distribution of hygiene to the beneficiaries visiting CTCs. SOYDA will also coordinate all clusters to maximum impact to beneficiaries
PROJECT PROGRESS.
Following the signing of the grant agreement on 22nd December 2017, SOYDA management have initiated the project implementation plan in which the organization management team held meeting to ensure the plan activities were timely in place to enable provide the services to the vulnerable communities, however, SOYDA have since initiated the following activities in its implementation plan that is :
1.1: Project staff recruitment.
In the past three weeks SOYDA have kick started the recruitment process of the staff where it has sent out the advertisement of the required project teams and in circumstances redeployed some of its senior staff to ensure the program start in timely manner. However, the project has so far recruited the position that needs to kick-start the program implementation.
1.2: Conducted community orientation meeting.
SOYDA management and project focal persons have conducted the community orientation meeting. The meeting was aimed at ensuring that the communities were well informing of the project objectives and target beneficiaries. SOYDA has recognized the important of community ownership creation in the project from the onset and has since conducted community leaders at each every IDPs sites meeting as well as the local authority leaders. This has set the basic entry start points for the target location in which the community members were informed of the plan unconditional support to vulnerable household. SOYDA management and the community leaders carried out mobilization and sensitization of the IDPs and parents to enroll their children particularly girls to the school through visiting house-to-house in the camps.
SOYDA management has also informed the community members the other project component ranging from health, Nutrition, WASH and Education and has elaborated the target principles in each sector.
1.3: Registration and profiling of target IDP schools.
SOYDA has since engaged the community leaders and school management committees to register the school going children in the target IDPs to school, so far a total of 200 pupils have been registered and enrolled in Gurmad IDPs schools in Elasha area.
1.4: Community sensitization to enroll their children to schools.
SOYDA management and recruited field staff have since engaged in rigorous community sensitization and mobilization within the targeted IDPs. This was initiated to ensure the families take the children to the school to benefits from the plan school feeding program in Gurmad schools.
The community sensitization is ongoing and has since reach most part of the IDPs while schools have registered a total of 200 children in the past one-week. This progress was made due to the concerted effort of the project team and community leaders in the target IDPs.
1.5: Distribution of desk and chairs to Gurmad IDPs School in Afgooye.
SOYDA field staff in Afgooye corridor has been able to distribute a total of 54 desk and 54 chairs to Gurmad IDPs schools in Afgooye. The distribution was targeted to help the already enrolled pupils in schools.
1.6: Provision of learning materials.
SOYDA provided and distributed first term school basic learning and teaching materials for the students and the schools to help them continue their education. The items distributed include exercise books, pen, pencil, sharpeners, erasers, mathematic sets for both teachers and students and mixed color dustless chalk.
1.7: School feeding program and Voucher distribution to school children.
The plan school feeding activities have been initiated and this attracted parents to allow their children to schools, avoid malnutrition to the pupil and prevent excess dropouts. Also the action to include distribution of food voucher through our integrated food security project to the households who allow their children to go to school particularly school aged girls is on going through Food Voucher Identification, selection, registration and distribution
1.8: Hygiene kits distribution
Since the inception of the projects activities both nutrition and health SOYDA have provided hygiene kits to the vulnerable children admitted at the nutrition centers in Afgooye corridors with hygiene kits. However, in the past one weeks of the project implementation SOYDA through the nutrition and health centers have been able to distribute a total of 58 hygiene kits to most deserving malnourished children in Afgooye.
Overall, SOYDA target to distribute 2,000 hygiene kits to the vulnerable children and families within the project location and the remaining activities will be subsequently implemented as this was the initial startup plan.
