On her daily visit to two-year old Dawoed’s home, Edoui Mohammed measures the child’s arm to check if she has gained any body fat. She asks Dawoed’s mother if there have been any problems, and advises her to feed the child eggs to help prevent diarrhoea. Crying indignantly and batting away her food, Dawoed today is very different to the lethargic baby Edoui discovered a month ago when she was so malnourished that she had to be taken to hospital.
Edoui comes from Wagalla village in Wajir, northern Kenya, where prolonged drought has killed thousands of cattle and left 30% of children malnourished in some areas. It has not always been easy for Merlin’s mobile feeding team to identify cases in the past, because some mothers do not know their children are malnourished or hide them from strangers because they are ashamed. Often the pastoralist parents are out grazing their cattle when Merlin’s mobile teams visit. But since June 2005, Merlin has trained more than 670 community members like Edoui to become “volunteer mothers” who help to identify, treat and raise awareness of malnutrition within their own villages. They also undergo basic health and hygiene training, and conduct follow-up visits to malnourished children to monitor their progress and provide support and advice.
So far the scheme has been very successful. Edoui has helped identify 56 malnourished children whom she has referred into Merlin’s emergency feeding programmes. “I know these children, and I can explain to their parents that they are malnourished and that Merlin can help,” she adds. “It is easy for me to support the parents through follow-up visits, and if the parents are out grazing their cattle when Merlin visits then I know where to find them.”
Asked to describe the most valuable thing she has gained through training, Edoui replies, “Simple knowledge I can pass on to my community, such as treating diarrhoea with a mixture of sugar, salt and water, and preventing it by washing hands before preparing food.”
Merlin has piloted the “volunteer mothers” scheme in a total of four divisions of Wajir and Turkana in northern Kenya. It plans to expand the scheme into seven more divisions of Wajir over the next year.