Door to Door Malaria Prevention Messages Saves Mary’s family

Every 3 months, Mary Joseph a mother of six children used to spend a week or more in the hospital due to malaria disease. The 35-year-old woman says if it was not children, it was her or her husband in the house being admitted.

This was a tendency and life was unbearable to the woman from Traditional Authority Njema, Njema Area Program, in Mulanje district.

She recalls,” Mainly it was children who were affected with diseases like malaria, diarrhea and dysentery and others. I could have lost one of my children if it wasn’t for support from health workers. That time my children could go to school on and off.

But today, the story is different for Mary, for a year now, her family including children has not suffered from any disease including malaria. The mother says the messages by Community Health Workers on the prevention of infectious diseases have helped her family to prevent malaria and diarrhoea.

Joseph attributed the success news to World Vision Malawi for promoting health-related messages in the area adding community health workers are providing the most essential life-saving interventions in the area.

“Through the door-to-door messages, we have benefited a lot. They usually tell us to sleep in mosquito nets, to have handwashing facilities, encourage us to seek medical treatment immediately, eating six groups of food among other important messages.

“Since I started receiving messages from community workers my family has been living a healthy life and we are doing our work like farming and business properly without disturbances. I wish this could come earlier before we struggled with malaria and other diseases,” says Mary.

Her 10-year-old first child Patricia concurred with her mother that for over a year now, she has not suffered any disease and has not missed class due to any health-related issues.

Patricia who hopes to be a Nurse and is currently in Standard 3 believes that good health can help her a lot to achieve her desired goals since she will be active at school.

Estele Mahela, a Health Promoter for the area, is one of the foot soldiers who continue to be vigilant in waging the war against diseases like malaria in the area. Mahela has been plying her trade for 5 years now.

She notes,” There is a great deal of progress in stamping out malaria. The introduction of the project by World Vision is a game changer as we have witnessed minimized cases to the extent that we are not registering malaria cases. We are getting in the right direction, we are getting there,” says Estele. 

Through the project World Vision Malawi is not only contributing to Malawi’s National Malaria Strategic Plan 2023-2030 which aims at eliminating malaria as a public health concern by the year 2030 but also to the National Malaria Communication Strategy 2022-2030 emphasizes enhancing social and behaviour change, increasing insecticide-treated nets usage, and improving malaria case management and prevention.