Why this Project is Important

Potential Long Term Impact

This project will provide life-saving clinical services, allow community ownership of health infrastructure, and help them advocate for their rights at the municipal level. After construction, the clinic will be fiscally self-sustaining.

Project Message

We are a poor neighborhood…but our poverty does not equate with powerlessness...When a child dies in your arms you ask what you did wrong. We will make this clinic happen because we need it to happen.
- Fatoumata Dicko Diaby, Member, community clinic management committee

Who is Running This Project

Contact

Caitlin Cohen,
US Coordinator
PO Box 20
5413 US Route 5
Westminster Station, Vermont 05159
United States
802 722 4029
Email:

Project Sponsor

Center for Global Engagement, Northwestern Univ

Organization

Learn more about Mali Health Organizing Project (MHOP) and the project team.

Where this Project is Located

Country

This project is located in Mali and can also be found under Health.

For more information about Mali, read the Human Development Report on Mali or the Wikipedia entry for Mali.

When this Project was Updated

Last Updated

This project was last updated on July 10, 2007.

Date Added to GlobalGiving

This project was added to the GlobalGiving project catalog on February 27, 2007.

Latest Update from the Field

Clinic committees formed, fundraising progressing.

By Caitlin Cohen - US Coordinator, July 10, 2007 05:46 PM

Progress on the Community Clinic in Sikoro is coming along, slowly but steadily!

We have elected and established the committee to oversee the clinic management after its construction, and another committee to do fundraising within the community. More than 400 people (219 registered adults) showed up to the “constituting assembly”.

We have submitted our application for the legal status of the clinic, the “ASACOMSI 2” (Association de Santé Communautaire de Sikoro 2). All the architect’s plans and engineer’s estimations for the building itself are complete, and the committees are starting the long process of collecting small taxes every month from the residents of Sikoro for their contribution the cost of the clinic. Hopefully we will have fundraised enough money to begin construction in March, 2008. We are partnered with the local government, as we believe that it is our role to foster rather than replace the public system, and we are asking the government to build an extension to the clinic in 2009. In the mean time, we continue to do public peer education on malaria and hygiene, including a malaria theater and mosquito-net distribution festival, pictured in the project gallery.

Furthermore, Mali Health Organizing Project’s peer educators have gone out into each house in the community and explained resident’s rights regarding the clinic, the process of voting for clinic committee members, and the benefits of membership (half-price consultations, voting rights). We have talked with the Imams of the village, the chiefs of each sector of the town, and other village leaders about promoting the clinic and fundraising. We are also starting to use local radio to explain the campaign and our accountability system.

We will not begin construction on the clinic until the fundraising is complete, so that the building is not harmed by rain. Thanks to all those who have contributed so far. With the money that has been given, we have a foundation (both literally and figuratively). The next few months of fundraising will be difficult, but we remain confident that it is possible to raise the requisite funds. Please help out by donating or spreading the word.

Peux ce que veux. Where there is a will there is a way.

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