Scout Association of Malawi

Play your Part Covid-19 Prevention Project

Location: Malawi (Nkhatabay District, Chintheche)

As covid-19 has devastated our economy, the government of Malawi is unable to reach out to all health facilities across the nation, hence our scouts in Chintheche-Nkhatabay district were motivated to mobilize locally. We found materials to make cloth face masks and distribute them to patients admitted at Chintheche health care who had no masks, where the hospital was unable to provide to the patients. This was was done at low scale due to limited resources. Further more, people around the community need civic education on how to wear and care for the masks as it has been noted that people only cover their mouth with the masks and not their nose. Further to that, the scouts would like to engage the Small Medium Enterprises making cloth face masks to observe quality standards as some are producing 1 ply masks not good for covid-19 prevention.

Scouts have managed to distribute 320 free face masks to patients admitted at the health center and around the clinic. It has been a challenge to meet the demand for free face mask distribution due to limited resources and high demand. However, the government has gazetted into law mandatory face mask wearing and vulnerable families can not manage to source the recommended face masks. This why we need to produce many to reach out to vulnerable families.

Support

Our required budget is $6000. Currently, scouts have been financing the project from their own financial contributions. To reach many people, we need $6000 to procure cloth, and sewing machines to produce more masks, do civic education and engagement meetings with SMEs producing sub-standard masks.

Other needs: Equipment (i.e. sewing machines)

For more information, contact covid19@unmgcy.org