By Sola Ogundipe

IT was a day to remember for residents of Ibafon Community, in Olodi-Apapa area of Lagos recently when in partnership with the Total Group in Nigeria, in partnership with the Lagos State Government, as 3,250 residents in 500 households were provided Long Lasting Insecticide Treated Nets, LLINs, in line with the global recommendations for malaria prevention.

Just before this year’s World Malaria Day, volunteers mobilised for the nets distribution programme facilitated by Kasher Consulting Ltd., embarked on community awareness, sensitisation and teaching/assisting residents to effectively hang their nets.

The beneficiaries, mostly made up of children aged 5 years and below as well as pregnant women within the community, responded with enthusiastic excitement and expectation.

Grace, a nursing mother in the community said she used to own one of the LLINs years ago, but had not had opportunity to have a replacement since the net got worn out. “Ï have been looking forward to when I would own another net, especially for my 3-year-old son and baby who is just five months old,” she remarked.

Grace who was one of the numerous beneficiaries of the enlightement drive of the Net-it-Out Project, on malaria prevention, said she also learned to properly set up and handle the net.

In a chat, Chiyenre Uche, Executive General Manager, Deep Water, in charge of administration, Total Nigeria said the joint effort is a way of giving back to society. “We know that in some areas people still have malaria but we chose this side as a place we can come to tell people about their health, educate them on how to prevent mosquitoes from going into their rooms and generally on malaria prevention.

“We give out nets, insecticides and educate them on how to prevent mosquito bites and also talk to them generally about mosquitoes so that they can be malaria free. Uche, who opined that the project was yearly, as the company’s Coporate Social Responsibility, said this year, Ibafon was selected. “A lot of people are eager about this, and we are quite pleased with the response,” she stated.

Also speaking, the company’s Corporate Affairs Manager, Mr Albert Novia said studies from previous programmes such as this showed that the intervention was successful in driving down the rate of malaria in the areas covered. “We have a monitoring team and discovered the rate of malaria reports dropped by about 25 percent as against before. We also expect here also that when we come back to do monitoring analysis we expect the rate to reduce.

“We have a casual consultant who already has gone in to take samples of malaria incident and after this intervention, he is going to do another sample interview to know weather it has dropped.” Further, Novia said: “If you have a community that is reporting frequent malaria incident and there is intervention, there will be a drop in the infection rate.

“If you have supplied a community with necessary materials to prevent malaria , you will be expecting change. “We visited 500 homes and gave them two net s in each home. 1000 net multiply by four, that is almost about 4,000 people. The attention was given to home which has children under five, women who are pregnant. We were fortunate to visit homes where one women just gave birth nine days ago,”he noted.

The campaign was followed by a seminar with doctors enlightening the people on a new approach to handle malaria cases,. The community was also encouraged to go for tests before administering antimalaria drugs. In a response, the Community Head, Ibafon expressed gratitude and pledged total support to the malaria prevention initiative.