Projects – NHI

RURAL WATER AND SANITATION

Every day, over 1400 children die from diarrhea caused by dirty water. This is just a proportion of the 4 million deaths from water-related diseases and poor sanitation each year. In Africa, more than 400 million people lack access to safe water and more than 1 billion don’t have adequate sanitation. In emergencies, many more lives are put at risk by inadequate water supplies and poor sanitation. It’s estimated that each person needs 15 litres of water per day for drinking, cooking, and washing in an emergency.

This makes providing clean water a massive task requiring the sort of innovative skills and solutions NESN Humanitarian Initiative has.

We work with local people, taking into account local needs and practices. We ensure that facilities are designed to enable people – particularly women and children – to maintain their dignity and stay safe. We also provide health and hygiene advice to ensure water and sanitation facilities are used properly to help prevent the spread of disease.

On long-term development, water, sanitation and hygiene underpin many of our poverty-fighting development projects. We work with local communities to provide long-term, cost-effective solutions that can reduce levels of poverty and disease.

Providing safe water can improve general health and reduce the pressure on often limited health care resources.

Introducing simple irrigation schemes can kick-start farming, improve local diets and give people the chance to make a living.

Providing clean water, latrines and hygiene advice at school can even increase attendance, reducing days lost through illness and raising educational performance. This can be particularly significant for girls. Schools play an important role helping to change attitudes towards hygiene within their wider community.

EDUCATION , WOMEN AND YOUTH EMPOWERMENT

Lasting improvement in the lives of the poor cannot be achieved without education. Access to education for all, particularly girls and women, disabled persons as well as improved quality of education are key components of our work in rural areas. Equally important is community involvement in education, without which long-term, positive change becomes elusive. NHI will provide scholarship, education promotion lectures, vocational training etc.

We promote increased access to educational opportunities for marginalized children and disabled persons, improved quality of education and increased community involvement in education.

HEALTH

Every day in Africa’s rural areas, teachers, doctors, nurses and community health workers are changing lives, often working against the odds to provide quality education and health care.

Yet each day more than 72 million children – many of them girls – still miss out on school; 1,400 women die needlessly in pregnancy and child birth; and only 5.2 million people living with HIV who need treatment get the medicines they need (UNAIDS 2010).

This lack of education and health care robs millions of people of their futures.

Fees are too high, hospitals and clinics are too few, many do not have the medicine people need, and there’s a lack of medical staff. Millions of people face the stark choice between low-quality care or none at all. It means unnecessary suffering and ever-deepening poverty, as illness affects people’s ability to work.

Focusing on remote and under served area, our community health care program that give people the tools they need to manage their own health needs, focus on caring for those affected by HIV and AIDS, improving child survival, especially among orphans and vulnerable children, developing proper water and sanitation system; improved nutrition; advancing material and child health etc.

While others approach the health problem in orthodox ways that have not produced effective result in the past. At NHI, we adopt innovative solutions that is recognized globally, to improve standards of health care in Africa. We provide free medical care through mobile clinic equipment. We help local people establish low-cost clinics. We advocate on free health care to mothers and children under five years of age by government. We also provide mobile healthcare services on common critical diseases via our proposed ‘Accessible Healthcare Map’ digital platform innovation project.

WOWEN’S RIGHT

The majority of people living in poverty are women. They tend to have fewer resources, fewer rights, and fewer opportunities to make life-shaping decisions than men. And when emergencies strike, they’re the worst affected. There are many, often complex, reasons why women are not reaching their full potential. Domestic violence, discrimination, and lack of education are among the biggest barriers

Women’s skills, resilience, determination, and ingenuity are valuable – but greatly underused- resources to overcoming poverty.

NESN Humanitarian Initiative is committed to supporting women claim their rights, and make decisions that affect their lives. Long-held and deeply entrenched prejudices will take time to break down. But we know it can be done when their potentials are unlocked;

With an education under their belt, a whole generation of girls will have opportunities that their mothers never had.
With literacy come confidence and the chance to earn more money, become self-sufficient – and speak out against violence.
With laws and systems that guarantee better health care, fewer women will die in childbirth, and fewer children will die from easily preventable diseases.
With loans, seeds, tools, better farming techniques and business training, more women will be able to grow more food, and sew, craft, and make goods that they can market themselves.

PEACE

The way we provide development assistance can actually prevent or transform conflicts. Peace building therefore lies at the heart of all we do. Conflict resolution, education and prevention are integral to our work of development and emergency recovery, part of peace building also means strengthen the less privileged that help communities collectively advocate for their own needs. This, in turn, encourages good governance and hold government accountable to their people.

TACKLING CLIMATE CHANGE

Life is already a struggle for poor rural communities in Africa. But climate change is making things so harder. Droughts and flood are becoming increasingly frequent, while growing seasons are more and more unpredictable. It means that millions of people are going hungry.

People living in poverty are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change for many reasons. They’re often forced to live in temporary settlements, on land prone to flooding, storms and erosion. Making a living is hard –so few will have savings to fall back on in an emergency. And when disaster strikes malnutrition, poor sanitation and health care promotes the rapid spread of diseases.

At NHI, we help people to understand and adapt to the changes they’re facing, and to reduce risks from hazards.

We work with local communities, bringing together the things we do best – linking people to the support and skills they need for a positive and sustainable future. We invest in poor communities’ knowledge, skills and resources to not only cope with a changing climate, but thrive.

And we employ some great ideas and innovative thinking to help people adapt, such as farmers planting faster-maturing crops, making the most of less-reliable rains and planting dense mangroves along the coast, to diffuse storm waves.

OUR APPROACH TO THE PROJECTS

We are unique in our approach to our projects, unlike traditional mitigation other organizations apply which has little effect to the identified problems.

We employ a low-cost sustainable model that is replicable from one geographical region to another and aligns with the SDG’s of the United Nations and other international development agencies. We combine mobile/innovation technology with the power of the sharing economy and an engaged local community