Our services are spurred by People, Rights, Peace!
We are primarily out to address some of the more critical problems of rural people through enlightenment and provision of some of the primary needs of the people that enhance quality of life, such as basic health education, good drinking water, safety awareness and environmental protection. We work for the benefit of rural people especially in developing countries to educate them on aspects of basic hygiene, good health management and facilitating the provision of good drinking water using the most affordable means. Long term plans will be rolled out to provide same through water well drilling, depending on available resources. As an interim measure, lectures will be given on means of making locally available water fit for drinking through boiling and filtering.
In some areas, availability of water is only seasonal. Getting water in those areas is by sinking boreholes to significant depths to reach ground water. This usually is at prohibitive costs relative to the people’s income level. Recourse is made to external resources here. Getting good drinking water out of season for these people is a major cause for concern to the Foundation.
We take our activities in tranches, addressing particular issues and needs as they arise, taking the people’s priorities into account. These priorities vary from place to place.
A social issue that needs urgent attention in the rural areas today, as in most places, is the lingering youth joblessness. This Foundation works to provide the youth with the necessary guidance to self-employment as an interim or permanent measure for individuals to address the problem. We encourage them with motivational lectures and guide them against restiveness, ignorance and contracting diseases, thereby making them useful to themselves and the society. We therefore counsel them on going to school as a means of providing for their future and staying out of trouble.
The acute shortage of well-equipped medical facilities in rural areas makes healthcare delivery an uphill task. As such, many avoidable deaths have occurred among the people. Friends-In-Need Foundation plans to organize social and preventive healthcare campaigns to educate the rural people, in particular, on the basic Do’s and Don’ts of good health management. The teaching of basic personal hygiene practices as well as handling of foods and drugs is a high priority based on what we know. We shall co-opt Chemists and Laboratory Scientists and attendants in this exercise as, inevitably, most of our rural population go to them first when they become ill. Everybody now knows the random diagnoses of Typhoid and Malaria emanating from laboratories and the attendant prescriptions for them often excluding medical doctors from exercising their professional rights over patients.
Sickle Cell Anaemia and HIV/AIDS will continue to get their deserved attention. Steps we take to address these health challenges include sensitization of the general public on how they are encountered and their preventive measures. Education on management of cases is pursued by guiding the people on symptoms to look out for and the advice to refer cases to hospitals for treatment by specialists. All these are taken up under our health education programs.