CCP has created the SPARK program, an internship and fellowship program in Tanzania, to bring new faces into social and behavior change.
USAID and its U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative have awarded the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs a five-year, $40-million contract to distribute insecticide-treated mosquito nets to the residents of Tanzania and Zanzibar.
Over the past five years, CCP has helped deliver 55 million insecticide-treated bed nets, initiated a game-changing new way to distribute them more efficiently and fundamentally altered the way that experts look at mosquito net access and use.
A dashboard created by a CCP project in concert with the Tanzanian government has saved time and money and made it much easier to distribute needed insecticide-treated mosquito nets to protect families across the East African nation from malaria.
“People who live along the lake don’t fish with mosquito nets because they want to,” says CCP’s Sara Berthe. “They do it because they are poor and hungry and mosquito nets are readily available.”
A CCP-led advocacy program in Tanzania used data outlining the high costs of paying for health care for pregnant women and young children to convince the nation’s leading private health insurer to begin covering the costs of modern contraception.
“If you really want to eliminate malaria, you have to look at what’s causing the remaining malaria cases once you have good prevention tools in place,” says CCP’s April Monroe.
“The idea of replacing mass campaigns with yearly school net distributions was pretty revolutionary, frankly,” says CCP’s Hannah Koenker. “It hadn’t ever been tried on such a large scale.”
Videos released for World Malaria Day tell the stories of the people who CCP’s VectorWorks project and the Tanzanian government rely on to help them prevent malaria.
“I have heard some girls saying, ‘We now want guys who are circumcised, we no longer want the uncircumcised ones as they may have [HIV/AIDS]’,” one uncircumcised 16-year-old from Zimbabwe told researchers.
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