1st April 2017 (no joke)
Dear All,
It’s been a busy four weeks focusing mostly on completing three books for Save the Children for their Diarrhoea Prevention and Control programme in Lagos, Nigeria. Plus we have created a bookmark for the children! Plus we have written Teacher’s Guidelines for their ‘Speaking Book’, Bayo’s Journey To Save Lola from Diarrhoea, a story I developed for the programme last year. Part of this process has been working intensively with our illustrator, David Gifford and we have some wonderful new images as a result, including the new image on the home page of our website.
So I spent last week conducting a Teacher Training workshop in Lagos! In this programme (like with most others), we are working with schools to mobilise upper primary school children to learn and share health messages, plus fun activities and ideas with their friends and family. All the messages are linked to the WHO/UNICEF 7-Point Plan on Diarrhoea Prevention and Control. I also got to meet one of the children’s families and asked them what affect their children’s activities have already had on family life. There are 48 schools in the programme and its already reaching thousands of children and their families.
We were excited to connect with a WHO/ITU programme in March too – called ‘Be He@lthy Be Mobile’ (not a typo!). It helps to develop Mhealth programmes on aspects of preventing Non-Communicable Diseases. They are currently working on large-scale programmes in eight countries. The team think it’s a good idea that part of their suite of Mhealth programmes include targeting young adolescents and that’s what we are planning to help them to do.
As part of this we’ve been reflecting on how our work relates to digital, read more here.
On 6th March, I was delighted to ‘pitch’ Children for Health at an RSA Engage event in Cambridge. I am a charity member of the RSA and they held a networking event where we met some great people and made other great contacts. As a result of this our hat is in the ring for a nomination to be the Cambridge University Press, Charity of the Year. Whatever the result it felt good to catch the interest of this company.
The other great excitement of the last four weeks has been reconnecting with an old friend in Kenya who participated on one of my training workshops in 1996 and whose son says his life was changed by the nutrition education activities as a result – read more here! One of our Trustees met Peter who wants to use our content and activities in the school. We are discussing the idea of establishing a Children for Health Model School where all our messages, teaching tools and approaches (including mobile) can be implemented, evaluated and filmed.
As always we are actively seeking funding – not least for our Model School Project. We have a very good offer from a corporate donor that they will match donations. So the most efficient way to help us would be to introduce us to another corporate sponsor who can double their money and their impact by contacting us now!
There’ll be stories from the field in the next edition!
Thanks so much for being in our community.
Please tell any friends or other charities that you know who may like to use our resources.
Best wishes
Clare