Our program involves analyzing levels of intestinal parasitism among people and animals in the region. In local communities in Rwanda for instance, we go to villages, meet with community leaders and collect fecal samples, in collaboration with Ministry of Health staff. After the samples have been analyzed, the data and medications are sent to the local clinics, allowing local people to visit the clinic nearest them, receive their results and obtain medications. Children are typically treated at local schools.
The communities are then also given hygiene and conservation education seminars, to aid in preventing re-infestation. We provide large metallic posters that demonstrate prevention methods, DVDs showing intestinal parasites, and evening films about hygiene and health. Our message is: “You are part of your environment. Let's work together toward achieving a healthy environment for people and endangered species.”
Through this program, we have now treated more than 200,000 people in Rwanda and DRC for intestinal parasites, and provided them with our hygiene education programs.
In 2006, DFGFI launched a Clean Water/Sanitation Initiative, after requests for help from public officials and community leaders in Rwanda in areas where we work. DFGFI believes that if clean water and adequate sanitation facilities can be provided, in conjunction with parasite treatment and prevention, and hygiene education, that we will see important progress toward both poverty reduction and conservation of endangered species in the area, thus achieving a healthy environment for all.
DFGFI, together with the Ruhengeri Health District Medical Officer, has developed a clean water/sanitation initiative covering the areas of Bisate, Kinigi and Kareba, which reaches some 200,000 people. The project is designed to be self-sustaining, and can be replicated elsewhere. It involves the purchase of new water collection equipment, as well as maintenance of the equipment and training of local health agents.
This initiative aims to reduce the prevalence of intestinal parasite infection among the local populations, which in turn will help to improve school attendance, reduce human traffic into the national park (which occurs as people search for clean water), reduce the burden on local clinics, and create permanent behavioral changes in hygiene methods.
Rehabilitation and rebuilding of the rural Bisate clinic in Rwanda was launched in 2006, in partnership with the Comprehensive Community Health Initiatives Program (CCHIPS), founded by one of our supporters and the Ministry of Health. The Bisate clinic serves people who live near the mountain gorillas of the Virunga mountains, and was in dire need of improvement. Extensive rebuilding and repair are underway, in addition to staff training and community health education.
DFGFI is helping to renovate clinics in communities surrounding Karisoke, such as this one in Bisate. Also in 2006, two other rural clinics were rehabilitated in Congo (DRC), and stocked with equipment and medicines: Mbuhi, near the Tayna Nature Reserve (with our partner the Jane Goodall Institute), and Rumangabo, near the Virunga National Park. This included providing medicines donated by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Inc., repair of basic infrastructures, and bringing in basic equipment, such as beds and clinic supplies.
Plans call for the rehabilitation of four more clinics at community reserve villages in Congo, as well as continued work in Bisate.
DFGFI has worked in recent years to help poor, rural communities obtain access to protein sources for food. This includes a goat project for the often-marginalized Ba'Twa community around Volcanoes National Park. This indigenous group of hunter-gatherers historically has used local forests for protein resources, supplementing this with local plants. The new program is aimed at helping the Ba'Twa integrate into local communities outside the park, in collaboration with our national partner REDO (Rural Environment and Development Organization), and to provide alternate sources of protein, in this case by raising goats.
DFGFI staff Pierre Kakule and Dr. Anny Muyisa visit Ba'Twa village. Since 2004, DFGFI has also been supporting successful small mammal projects and protein-producing crop projects for widows and orphans in villages around Tayna Nature Reserve. This project is self sustaining and provides both protein access and income for the villagers who manage it. We plan to repeat these projects around the community based reserves and national parks.
