Health Program
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CHALLENGE
Health care is expensive, especially in the communities 22STARS operates in that are struck by poverty. As a developing country, Uganda struggles with multiple intractable diseases that kill millions of Ugandans every year. HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, espiratory tract infections, and diarrheal diseases are among the top five causes of death in Uganda. Additionally, many children have no access to eye health care, which causes them to drop out of school due to bad vision. Especially in Acholi Quarter eye health care has been a huge problem, as many children are crashing stones in the quarry. Not only do stones fly into the eyes of the children, leaving them blind for the rest of their lives, also the dust and lack of clean water to wash their eyes causes many eye infections. Uganda has a scarcity of trained eye care professionals available to provide accessible care, this is particularly evident in optometry services which impact on an adult’s capacity to earn and a child’s capacity to learn. Early eye examinations are crucial to make sure children have normal, healthy vision so they can participate better at school and in play.
SOLUTION
With our Health Program we pay for the medical bills for children, whose situation is life threatening, and whose parents are not able to pay for it. We believe strongly that malaria should not be the reason anymore for a child to die. Whenever we bring children to a hospital, we usually also bring their parent or caretaker along, pay for transportation and also meals during the day, since a hospital visit can take easily take up to 10 hours. As a subcategory of our Health Care Program, is our Eye-healthcare Program, which we launched thanks to a partnership with WirHelfenSehen E.v, who visited us in 2018. Within our Eye-care program we have been able to send two students to an Optician School to become Optometrists. Several times a year, we take children and their families to the eye hospitals and opticians to get their eyesight checked and get medication, or glasses where needed. We even were able to pay for the operation of several children and young people who had a damaged eye due to the stone quarry work. Additionally, we are spreading awareness about blindness prevention and conduct eye health education programs in the local communities.
GOAL
Within the Eye-care Program we are planning that our recent graduates from the Optician school will help conduct eye testing in the communities we work in and expand to other communities. We have 459 sponsored children now, where possible their parents or care takers also pay for medical costs. However often the costs are too high for the parents and hence we need to help out. Whenever an operation of a child is very expensive, we set up a specific emergency fundraiser for the child. As the money raised for our Health Program is supposed to cover the basic medical needs of all our sponsored children. Our goal is to raise each month €250,-. That is €3.000,- a year, so that we can take care of the basic health care needs of the children.
