Create Healthy Communities

Changing the Face of Health among Nomadic CommunitiesCommunities are at the heart of AMREF’s work. Our goal is to enable communities to live healthier lives.

We work with the some of the poorest and most marginalised people in Africa; those living in remote rural areas, urban slums, nomadic populations and areas affected by conflict.

We develop health projects in close consultation with communities so that they are relevant to their specific needs; whether they are living in a slum in Nairobi, an internally displaced people’s camp in northern Uganda or a remote rural area in Ethiopia.

Communities identify their own health needs and AMREF then works with them to develop projects that will meet these needs. We believe that the community is resourceful, and so we put their interests and opinions first – working in partnership at all levels, every step of the way.

AMREF enables communities to take control of their own health development and to help them demand the assistance and services to which they are entitled.

Within the different communities, AMREF targets those who are most vulnerable to ill health: women, children under the age of five and young people.

Learning from the community

In almost every case where we have intervened to solve community health problems we learnt that the community itself had the answer to many of its own problems. 

Children are most vulnerable

Over 80% of the households in Africa survive on less than US$1 per day. As a result, poor children in Africa are 10 times more likely to die before their 5th birthday, and 9 times more likely to die of infectious diseases than children from richer families are.