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Projects
As Africa’s leading health development organisation our vision is lasting health change in Africa. Our projects range from providing communities with safe, sustainable water supply and sanitation facilties, to training local midwives to ensure that remote communities have access to maternal health care. These projects are all built around AMREF's strategic priorities, developed by AMREF to maximise our impact and structure our vital health work.
AMREF’s project in Kechene, funded by three of AMREF’s corporate partners, Diageo, Euromoney, and Opal Foundation, aims to improve the health status of communities living within the Kechene slum by improving the access to water and sanitation facilities.
AMREF partner pharmaceuticals company, GlaxoSmithKline has announced its commitment to reinvest 20% of profits made in the Least Developed Countries back into projects that strengthen the healthcare infrastructure in those countries.
AMREF’s project in Mtwara, in partnership with DFID, aims to address the current denial and neglect of the rights of young people, particularly vulnerable girls in Tanzania. While 60% of young people have had sex before the age of 18, contraceptive use is only 6%.
Malaria is the most important parasitic disease in the world. It kills over one million people each year - 90% of them in Africa. 125,000 people die from malaria each year in Tanzania and nearly two thirds of them are children.
South Omo is one of the least developed regions of Ethiopia, with some of the worst health indicators globally. Incredibly remote, it suffers from social marginalisation and is characterised by poverty, underdevelopment and lack of services.
AMREF, with the support of the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID), is working on a 3 year innovative Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) programme, which is tailored to meet the needs of vulnerable young people.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to more than two thirds (68%) of the global population living with HIV (22.5 million) but only a little over 10% of its population. In 2007, an estimated 1.7 million people in the region became newly infected.
HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB are placing a huge strain on Uganda’s already fragile health system. Health centres are under-funded and under-staffed. Information gathering has been inaccurate and non-conclusive about the fight against disease.
Child mortality in South Africa is unacceptably high, with 62 out of every 1,000 children dying before they reach their fifth birthday. That figure is approximately 5 out of every 1,000 children in the UK.
AMREF’s recently completed e-learning programme training nurses in Kenya was a fantastic success, helping 7,000 Kenyan nurses gained national registration in 2011. AMREF aims to replicate this success in Tanzania, where there are only 10.9 nurses per 10,000 people: in the UK there are 103 per 10,000.
In sub-Saharan Africa maternal and child health rates remain unacceptably high. Every year in the region 200,000 mothers die in pregnancy. 1.5 million African children are left without a mother each year. Despite the world’s progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals, those targets related, particularly to maternal health, remain far from reach.
Achieving good health is critical in breaking the poverty cycle. In Makueni, a remote county in Kenya, 77% of the population lives below the poverty line, and health indicators for women and children are alarming. In Kenya the risk of a woman dying from pregnancy or childbirth during her lifetime is 1 in 38 - that number is 1 in 3,800 in the UK.
Pregnant women and young children are particularly at risk of contracting malaria because they tend to have weaker immune systems. Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world and Afar, in the north-east, is one of the most disadvantaged regions. Nine out of ten people do not have access to safe water and the literacy rate is the lowest in the country at 7%.
