Welcome to African Health Foundation Website

aFRICAN hEALTH fOUNDATION

COMMENTS

“With heartfelt gratitude, we register our appreciation for finishing Malela Hope Center and supporting Malela-Kenya AIDS orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) Community-based care program. ” - Martin Owino -President(AHF)

“Helping to Provide Hot meals during lunch to AIDS orphaned Children, 24 Children are currently participating in the AIDS orphans feeding program; 18 are on the waiting list due to budget constraints”......

Malela Hope Center, Homa-Bay District -Kenya:

feeding programs

Malela Hope Center Projects consist of Soup Kitchen/Food Pantry, Elementary School, Dispensary, Church, and Clean Water supply, Also. The Center strives to sustain the program by initiating the following projects:, catering services, tailoring, water sales, brick making machine and oil press. The center adapted a holistic approach to respond to AIDS crisis in the area.

ahf

welcome to african health foundation

Malela Hope Centre

Hot Meals Program

Girl Child schooling

Sports

.....Hands up and not Handouts

Africa Health Foundation (AHF) Inc. is a nonprofit organization whose passion and commitment is to empower disfranchised and impoverished African communities to access and consistently utilize medical and socioeconomic services in order to become and remain healthy and productive society. AHF strives to assist African communities in Sub-Saharan Africa to rediscover their strength and potentialities in problem solving. AHF is designed to provide basic human health needs and enabling environment to help promote sustainable economic growth, education healthy behaviors and lifestyles necessary to reduce mortality and morbidity among sub-Saharan communities, especially women and children.

AHF is located in Malela, a small, rural community in Western Kenya with the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rate (24-34%). Most deaths due to HIV/AIDS occur among the young and productive age groups leaving lots of orphans and vulnerable children behind. In response to this crisis, African Health Foundation (AHF) initiated an integrated community programs to help rehabilitate families and distressed community fabric. The program successfully adapted and used an African extended family system that natures and cares for children in these extended families in their community. To implement the program, AHF built a Hope Center that coordinates HIV prevention and education activities and also provides food to OVC during school time and a food pantry for guardians to provide evening meals for these orphaned children in their adopted homes. Below are the services that Malela Hope Center supports and coordinates in its integrated approach to HIV/AIDS menace in Malela.

AHF Current main initiative:

Hope Centers:

African Health Foundation supports three rural-based community Hope Centers Initiatives to provide hope and solidarity to victims of HIV/AIDS. The aim of Hope Centers Initiative is to help build sustainable projects through community empowerment, mobilization and training to help them develop skills that is necessary to produce resources needed to care for the weak members of the society. Hope Centers are operating on the philosophy of lifting community hands to stand, walk and eventually run on their own…Hands up and not Handouts

Brief History of Malela-Kenya (Current Project site):
Malela is located in Western Kenya, Homa-Bay District, a region with the highest cases of HIV/AIDS. A sprawling village of an estimated 6,000 people, Malela is among the villages that has the highest number of AIDS orphans and widows in Homa-Bay District. Children are already going hungry because their parents who were farmers are dead. Some children have assumed the leadership role in their families, while others are fleeing to the urban center (Homa-Bay ) to sell sex for food and other basic life necessities. Economies are collapsing and famine is growing in areas that always had food. Hands of the villagers are stiff due to frequent burials of their loved ones. AIDS wipes out the middle generation leaving behind lots of helpless orphans with aging grandparents with zero income. Hopelessness has gripped the land predisposing many to physical, mental and emotional ailments. In 1999 African Health Foundation responded with Hope Centers Initiative to restore hope in the village. Currently, the Hope Center, with its meager resources serves a catchment area of approximately fifty thousand people.

our goal

To restore hope and communal responsibility to withstand the devastation caused by HIV/AIDS. The Hope Center provides the community with a favorable environment, hope, solidarity and the ability to coordinate and mobilize the available community resources and skills to benefit AIDS orphans, their families and AIDS patients.

specific objectives

To provide AIDS orphans with hot meals;
To support orphans to continue with their formal education;
To provide AIDS patients with Palliative Medical Kits;
To provide community health workers and families with home-based care training;
To provide grandparents and widows with food to prepare for orphans in their homes in the evening;
To prevent migration of orphans and young widows from their rural homes to urban areas to sell their bodies for food and other basic life necessities;
To provide counseling and spiritual therapy to those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS;
To provide hands-on skills to orphans and widows to help them make an income;
To provide clean safe water for the community;
To promote youth sports and club activities to prevent young people from living an idle life and engaging in risky behaviors;
To promote modern farming techniques and supply farmers with suitable crop seeds to enhance crop production in the community;
To train community health workers on home-based care and family counseling;
To promote Christian teaching and healthy family life styles to help eliminate cultural and traditional practices that facilitates HIV transmission in the community.

ahf