Healthcare

Through our Community Development, we have the potential to make a real and positive change in the community. This is one of our key areas of focus here at Wix.com, and a source of much success for our Nonprofit Organization. Get in touch with us today and see how you can lend a helping hand with this program.

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The Problem

Some of the greatest threats to community in Africa are posed by complex and common disease outbreaks. There are more disease outbreaks in Africa than any other continent and major killers like Hypetnsion and cancer continue to kills hundreds of thousands of people each year. For instance, in 2014, several African countries including Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Nigeria were ravaged by the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), resulting in thousands of deaths and creating panic around the world. Apart from easily communicable disease like EVD, African communities must face, cope, or live with killer diseases and viruses like malaria, cholera, cerebro spinal meningitis, small pox, chicken pox, guinea worm, polio, and HIV/AIDS. For instance, HIV/AIDS continues to pose some of the most significant threat to communities in Africa.

According to the Bil and Melinda gates Foundation, “more than 33 million people around the world are currently living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and more than 30 million people have died from HIV-related complications since the earliest cases were detected in the 1980s.”

Although the world has made huge progress to increase access to HIV screening and treatment, helping to significantly reduce new HIV infections in Africa, a lot still has to be done not only to stop HIV/AIDS but also to develop the type of health institutions in Africa that can meaningfully contribute to disease prevention and treatment. The significant health challenges that Africans in their various communities in Africa face can only be surmounted if well meaning people all over the world contribute their skills, resources, and efforts to engage the range of factors that makes healthcare unaffordable or unavailable to millions of people on the continent. Not only is money required, but innovative ideas about new programs, tools, equipment, and resources that can help to reduce the scale of the problem, are also direly needed.

The Goal

The Okonofua Foundation wants to make healthcare available and affordable for everyone in the community. Every day, poor Africans in underserved communities in Africa, embody intersecting identities of poverty, ethnicity, gender, and sicknesses. Yet, their realities are typically overlooked and insufficiently understood in terms of their access to the good things of life, including healthcare. Thus, understanding the factors that make health care unavailable and unaffordable to millions of people on the continent has become a categorical imperative and a top priority for this organization. By understanding these factors and the processes through which they shape the health environment, researchers, governments, and organizations like ours, can design interventions that might help to increase communities access to health care. This will save millions of lives and help communities regenerate themselves and increase their capacity to support their populations.

The Strategy

The resources of the foundation, which are considerably little, will be utilized to support organizations already working with aid money to reach targeted populations. Because our funds are limited compared to the challenges, the foundation will partner organizations already working in targeted but highly vulnerable communities in Africa to deliver our promise of improved conditions and access to health resources and opportunities.

Areas of Focus

We have four areas to advance the development and delivery of health care support, including Malaria prevention (provision of treated nets, malaria screening equipment, and medication subsidization); HIV prevention (advocacy to improve HIV/AIDS awareness, training to develop capable HIV/AIDS response teams, screening to develop capacity for early detection); Hypertension (to improve knowledge about and efforts to control obesity, improve access to treatment and counseling, support free exercise regimes and clinics as an alternative approach to treatment); Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment (to support drug screening programs, support drug rehabilitation efforts, and to support advocacy and training on the health impact of drug abuse).