EXTREME MAKEOVER: Reaching out to urban migrant communities

I am paid to re-write text, and make it more consumer-friendly. This is a sample of a recent piece:

MY EDITS:

Every year, more than 30,000 people make the perilous journey across Egypt’s lengthy desert border, in an effort to get to Israel. Unemployment, conflict, and harsh living conditions pull people to Egypt from as far away as Somalia.

Many of the migrants are undocumented. They live in squalid conditions on the outskirts of town, with little or no access to basic health care. A programme, designed the Internationl Organztion for Migratn (IOM) to cater for the migrants’ needs, has seen 82 migrant community health volunteers make 2,390 door-to-door visits between July and December 2011.

The programme, intended to strengthen links between service providers and vulnerable migrant communities in Egypt, benefited 263 men, women, and children from Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea.


ORIGINAL PIECE:

As a part of IOM–Cairo’s efforts to promote migrants’ health awareness, the Transit Migration Project has started a Community Health Volunteers (CHV) Training Program by which community members are trained to be focal points of information dissemination and referral points for members of their respective communities to IOM and other organizations and health care providers providing assistance to migrants. This program was also designed in response to an identified need to increase migrants’ access to health care. Indeed language barrier and miscommunication, lack of trust from the migrant communities towards government healthcare facilities, lack of knowledge regarding rights to access healthcare all contribute to inadequate access for many migrants to appropriate healthcare. The IOM Transit Migration Project has trained volunteers from the Sudanese, Somali and Eritrean communities in coordination with the Egyptian Red Crescent. The training covered topics such as community mobilization; community needs assessment, first aid, and psychosocial support.. The volunteers also became acquainted with the symptoms and management of some diseases that are widely spread in the community including diabetes, T.B. and Anemia. HIV and AIDS awareness was part of the training to meet an urgent need for migrants focused health programs. Livelihoods and family well being were as well part on the training to enhance communities’ general well being. Since the beginning of the program volunteer CHVs were involved in over 25 awareness raising workshops addressing general health issues, such as management of diarrhea in children, anemia, and TB. The workshops were conducted in 4 migrant dense areas in Greater Cairo. Volunteers conducted more than 600 home visits to provide direct health-related assistance, out of which 90 cases were referred for direct assistance through IOM’s current direct assistance program. We hope this initiative will strengthen the links and communication between service providers and the migrant communities in Egypt and will assist in increasing access to appropriate health care to those most vulnerable.


END//

Region: Egypt, Eritrea, North Africa
Theme(s): Migration, Health, Humanitarian assistance

The author is a health communications consultant. Follow her on Twitter [@msanyuosire] & keep tabs on tips she shares with health communications officers by "liking" her facebook page [Mary-Sanyu Osire].