Island Governments - Jersey Overseas Aid Commission (JOAC)
The Jersey Overseas Aid Commission believe that it is their moral duty to care about other people and to help them help themselves. Jersey is also a signatory to Agenda 21 which commits them to moving to a target of overseas aid funding which is comparable with that of other national states.
AMREF and JOAC in partnership
The Jersey Overseas Aid Commission has supported AMREF for over ten years, providing co-funding for a range of projects across our work in Africa. In recent years, money from the Jersey Overseas Aid Commission has helped enable AMREF to work with some of the most vulnerable communities in Africa's most remote areas. These have included a community based health care project focusing on malaria in the Mtwara district of Tanzania, a maternal, newborn and child health project in the Kechene slum district of Ethiopia and on a number of projects bringing better health to the nomadic pastoralists of Kenya and Ethiopia.
JOAC also awarded AMREF two emergency grants to help people in an acute time of need during the severe flooding of the South Omo region in Ethiopia and a deadly outbreak of Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD) in Afar, Ethiopia.
PROJECT IN FOCUS: South Omo Pastoralist Health, Ethiopia
South Omo is one of the most disadvantaged regions in Ethiopia where 70% of the population lives below the basic poverty line.
The region’s only hospital serves a population of nearly half a million people and there is a severe shortage of health workers. Most people do not have access to transport and nomadic communities in particular find it difficult to seek healthcare. AMREF is working to deliver essential healthcare appropriate to the traditional pastoralist way of life.
The project is tackling the major causes of ill health, HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, severe malnutrition, water-related diseases, and mother and child services. Health workers are being trained and their services adapted to a migratory lifestyle by providing bicycles and mobile drug kits. Mosquito nets for nomadic families are being distributed and educational ‘health days’ teach the community about how to use them, as well as about other childhood illnesses, maternal and sexual health, and harmful traditional practises. Special focus is also being given to improving women’s access to an improved health, social and economic status with women’s cooperatives being established to give them independence and economic security.