Hauwa Yau

Hauwa Yau

Last year, I was given a mosquito net. I really enjoyed using it and my children and I regularly sleep inside the net to prevent mosquito bites.
– Hauwa Yau

Hauwa Yau has just served her children lunch and sits in front of her hut in the Rugan Hardo settlement tucked away in a corner of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. The settlement lacks basic amenities like health care, roads, education and clean water.
But Hauwa smiles as she talks about the delivery that made a big change in the lives of her family and her community.
“Last year, I was given a mosquito net,” she says. “I really enjoyed using it and my children and I regularly sleep inside the net to prevent mosquito bites.”
In 2017, as part of the activities marking World Malaria Day, volunteers from the Centre for Communication and Social Impact (CCSI), a CCP sister organization in Nigeria, visited Hauwa’s settlement to create malaria prevention awareness and encourage the use of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets to keep away mosquitoes infected with the malaria parasite.
Most importantly, they brought bed nets for the people of Rugan Hardo. For more than two decades, the community has been ravaged by malaria without a solution in sight. Enter the CCSI team which distributed nets to the households and taught residents the right way to use them.
Now, things are different. Constant illness is a thing of the past and community members are healthier and more productive.
“Before we started using the mosquito nets, we constantly had malaria, headaches. When we slept we ended up hitting our backs, our ears and faces. Mosquitoes are small insects but the effect of their bite is serious,” says Abdullahi Yau, the leader of the community.