Susana's story

Susana knows all too well how devastating malaria can be. Almost everyone in her family has had malaria. The preventable disease impacts their lives daily.
During each day as a community health worker, Susana visits up to 20 people from her home village in Namibia and neighbouring ones. She checks for malaria symptoms, carries out tests, and provides important health education about malaria and key tips to prevent the disease.

Susana is proud of everything she has learned through the project and the new skillset she has gained that equipped her with the right tools to support her village. She is convinced that the project has had a great impact among her fellow community members, dispelling myths and providing real information about the parasite: "It also killed the myths that you can get malaria from eating watermelon or walking in the rain."

But Susana realises that not everyone has access to this information and that more community health workers should be trained to provide coverage in more villages in the district.

In 2018, Malaria No More UK and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) collaborated on a project to increase the pace of Namibia’s progress towards malaria elimination. Working with the National Vector-borne Diseases Control Programme and Ministry of Health, the collaboration supported the rollout of programmes which trained new health workers across districts and mobilised domestic resources for other interventions – such as insecticides and surveillance to anticipate outbreaks.