Gandami Rural Clinic Community COVID-19 Response Project

The challenge that the project addresses

Provision of personal protective equipment (PPE), essential medicines and medical equipment for a neglected rural clinic, Gandami, that serves a catchment area of over 10 000 families in Wiltshire farming community, Mashonaland East, rural Zimbabwe.

What is your project doing to respond to this challenge?

In consultation with the health workers at Gandami Clinic, we activated community action, fundraising within the Wiltshire Community, and among people connected to the rural Clinic who are now outside Zimbabwe in the diaspora, to raise funds to give back to their community through the provision of personal protective equipment (masks, goggles, gloves, aprons, shoe covers, hairnets, hand sanitizers, infra-red thermometers, essential medicines). In ten days we raised over ZWL $110 000.00 from small individual donations by members of the Wiltshire Community in Zimbabwe and abroad, and bought the COVID-19 PPE and essential medicines. Our initiative caught the attention of Zimbabwe’s Deputy Minister of Health, Dr. C Mangwiro, who agreed to travel to Gandami Clinic on 16 May 2020 to be guest of honour at the official handover of the donations. This is a unique on-going initiative that is dependent primarily on small donations and contributions by community members, making it a sustainable intervention as there is proud community ownership of the project.

Individuals unable to donate in cash are welcome to give in kind, including donating chickens, goats, cows, crops, among other things, towards the development and upliftment of Gandami Clinic and, going forward, the general development of the Wiltshire Community. Our project has ignited values of working together, collectively focusing on development, and, in the process, uniting a community.

Describe the project's impact

Beneficiaries of the project are over 10 000 families that are in the catchment area of this rural community in the small-scale farming area of Wiltshire, in Mashonaland East Province, Zimbabwe. Gandami Clinic Health workers will also benefit as we have provided them with adequate personal protective equipment to combat COVID-19. The Wiltshire Community will benefit through adapting this unique approach of fundraising from among community members, enshrining the values of collective community action, unity, cooperation, and people living and working together. This approach will be replicated, not just to support the clinic, but also for other projects like improving the rural schools in the Wiltshire Community. Already, community members are coming up with different ideas of for other areas of focus that need collective, united community action.