Need

Ghana’s entire population of over 24,000,000 people is at risk from malaria which accounts for 1/3 of all hospital admissions and is a leading cause of death amongst young children. It stops people from working and children from going to school. Over 1/4 of Ghana's population live below the poverty line and malaria helps keep them there. Pregnant women and young children are the most vulnerable to malaria's effects. However with the right tools malaria is preventable and treatable.

Solution

MNMUK is working alongside the Ghanaian, British and American governments to help prevent malaria by providing free mosquito nets. Together we have already distributed over 2,500,000 nets in Ghana to help protect up to 5,000,000 people. Our goal is to ensure that every household has a net by the end of 2012. Nets help prevent malaria by stopping mosquitoes carrying the disease from biting people at night -the favourite feeding time. Sleeping under a net can cut young child deaths by over 20%

Aims

Work with partners to ensure every household in Ghana has a net and uses it correctly.

Activities

» Provide ropes and nails needed to hang the nets.
» Help fund the transport of nets to make sure they reach even the most remote homes.
» Help train local volunteers to distribute and hang donated nets in every home.
» Support volunteers going house to house, hanging nets and teaching people how to use them properly.

Success will be measured by number of nets distributed, hung and used correctly. Ultimately success will be significantly reduced malaria in Ghana.

Impact

Our ultimate objective is to help stop people suffering and dying from malaria in Ghana. Increasing access to malaria control tools like mosquito nets has already helped halve the incidence of malaria in 11 African countries. Helping to ensure everyone in Ghana can sleep under a mosquito net is a relatively cheap investment but it is also a critical first step to reducing this disease.

Risk

A key risk for all mosquito net distributions is that once received, the nets are not used by householders. We minimise this risk by making sure that people are educated and their net is hung for them to encourage correct use. We also take on board learning from our work with multiple partners in other regions, helping inform improvements to the net distribution model.

Reporting

We produce regular updates on our website and in our monthly e-newsletter to help report to donors how our funds are invested and ongoing progress made in the fight against malaria. An end of programme report will be provided to funders of this work, to demonstrate its impact.

Budget - Project Cost: £300,000

Current Funding / Pledges

Source	Amount
Anonymous	£200,000	Conditional

Location

The project will support those regions of Ghana that have not yet received sufficient nets to reach "universal" coverage: Northern, Upper East, Upper West, Ashanti, Brong Ahafo and Greater Accra. The regions all have areas of extreme poverty and everyone is at risk from malaria. The total population is 15million.

Beneficiaries

Everyone in these regions will benefit from nets and education. Children under 5 and pregnant women will benefit most significantly as they are most susceptible to severe malaria. However the aim is for the whole community of 15million people to benefit from better health and reduced malaria risk by using nets.

Why Us?

Malaria No More UK has a long term commitment to working in Ghana. We have strong in country partners and have been involved from the beginning of this campaign, helping pilots this model of free net distribution and hang up in 2010 when volunteers were used to distribute and hand 1million mosquito nets to help protect 2million people. This model has now been adopted as national standard by the Government of Ghana.

Read more about the Charity running this project.

People

Local Volunteers

Volunteers in Ghana are vital to ensuring long term success. They are trained to hang nets in homes and deliver vital malaria education.