CESTOS, River Cess – More than 100 community health assistants have been trained to create awareness ahead of an effort by the River Cess County Health Team to distribute mosquito nets.
The team is working in collaboration with Community Health Education and Social Services, known as CHESS Liberia, to implement the project. Rogger Gloglo, the logistics officer of CHESS Liberia, told The Bush Chicken that the distribution of the nets is expected to take place in March this year.
He said the training was done in two phases: one for the county health team and another for the community health assistants.
“Members of the county health team were brought together for the first training,” Gloglo said. “We are now training the [community health assistants] or [general community health volunteers] to go to their communities and create more awareness.”
Gloglo said one of the biggest concerns of the distribution campaign was to ensure that the mosquito nets are used for their intended purpose – preventing mosquito bites and therefore curbing the incidents of malaria. In some areas, the freely distributed mosquito nets are used for a variety of purposes, including as fishing baskets, and to fence gardens and poultry enclosures.
Rogger Gloglo wants the public to use mosquito nets for their intended purposes, and not for purposes such as fencing poultry enclosures. Photo: Eric Doue
“This other distribution will be different from past ones,” Gloglo said. “We are not just going to distribute and turn our backs, we will also make follow ups to ensure that the nets are used for the intended purpose.”
The nets will be distributed to households across the county. The project is funded by the Global Fund through Plan International.
Featured photo by Jim Gathany/CDC. Editor’s note: A previous version of this article contained an erroneous figure for the number of community health assistants trained.
