The Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic (LTFHC)/WAVE has had an incredibly important year, both in terms of our program implementation and in elevating awareness of what is at stake in the Lake Tanganyika Basin.
Your support allows us to continue to advocate for an extremely remote yet geopolitically crucial part of the world where no one else is comprehensively working, and whose success—or failure—has lasting consequences for over 12 million people, the entire region, and the world as a whole.
We hope you will consider a year-end gift to enable us to continue this important work.
Here’s a quick snapshot of what we’ve been up to in 2015:
Innovation in Malaria Control
Building upon our previous research (featured in the New York Times in January), this year we assembled a diverse study group and began preparations to further investigate bed net misuse in the Lake Tanganyika Basin. Our team has been busy preparing for the first phase of this research, a scoping exercise to gather extensive cross-sectoral baseline data that includes public health, socio-economic, fisheries, and environmental indicators in at least 65 villages along the Congolese coast of Lake Tanganyika.
Communications Network and Electronic Medical Record Expansion and R&D
The LTFHC has expanded our radio installation program to reach 200,000 people, and we are still seeing dramatic benefits. For example, on-time weekly reporting from Nyemba Health Zone to the DRC Ministry of Health increased from 26% in 2014 to 79% in the first six months of 2015 for the facilities where we installed HF radios. Watch a short film detailing this initiative>>
Comprehensive family planning outreach in Tanzania
Health care worker training
In May, the LTFHC completed phase 1 of a family planning program in Rukwa, Tanzania. The combined activities of this outreach, including training rural health care workers in family planning topics and insertion of implants and IUDs, impacted over 90,000 people. Watch a video featuring our activities>>
Data collection on the remote Ubwari Peninsula
In early 2015, our team traveled to the Ubwari peninsula in the DRC – home to 100,000 people with no road, phone, or access to services—to perform technical and epidemiological surveys and have discussions with health center staff and community members to help inform appropriate program design. See photos from this outreach>>
WAVE’s leadership during the Burundi refugee crisis
As one of the few organizations with a consistent presence in the Lake Tanganyika Basin, we have delivered on the ground feedback for governmental and multi-lateral stakeholders during this tumultuous time. Through our local office in Kigoma, Tanzania, we have also provided housing and transport for other organizations actively working with Burundian refugees. We continue to work closely with authorities monitoring the situation in Burundi— please contact us if you would like to receive more information.
White Paper on Water-based Health Care
This year we released the executive summary of our next white paper: “Water-based Health Care- Have We Missed the Boat?” Our purpose in publishing this paper is to introduce the concept of “water-based communities” and the unique systems design thinking that they require. Read the executive summary>>
Access Lake Tanganyika
The LTFHC/WAVE is facilitating a public-private partnership between the Lake Tanganyika Authority, British Telecom, and other telecom partners to bring a comprehensive mobile network to the Lake Tanganyika Basin. This fundamental infrastructure will dramatically improve service delivery across sector to the over 12 million people living in the Lake Tanganyika Basin.
Our small, efficient team continues to punch far above our weight, providing on-the-ground tangible improvements to local health care capacity in the Lake Tanganyika Basin, while simultaneously beginning to catalyze other stakeholders towards more effective and durable interventions in this region.
Thank you again. Without you, this work would simply not be possible.
