Hanging mosquito net intrigues villagers

Preventing malaria is one aspect of Uganda Village Project’s mission. In order to do this, UVP educates our communities about the causes and prevention of malaria and also provides nets in our villages at a subsidized rate.

However, it can be hard to get large numbers of community members to attend the educational sessions. In the communities where we work, most people are rice growers, and this means they spend much of their time in the rice paddies in swamps and come back to their homes late in the evening after a full day’s work.

During our internship program in the summer of 2013, we shared this challenge with the interns. We asked them to come up with innovate ways to educate people about malaria and net usage.

During the course of the internship, one intern team decided to hang nets at the bore hole, community meeting places, and road junctions for an entire day during the course of one week. Inside the nets, they included a small poster showing the causes, prevention, and treatment of malaria. When villagers came to those places, the hanging net got their curiosity and they moved closer to inquire why a net was hanging outside and not inside the house on a bed! As they moved closer, they read the information on the poster. Later, during follow-up sessions when asked where they got their knowledge on malaria and net usage, twenty percent replied from the hanging net.

The interns’ creative idea helped us to reach people with malaria knowledge. We have kept this option as a tool for education and encourage all new intern teams to implement it in all the new villages!