Medicine Education Africa (MEA) is a non-profit organization located in Tanga, Tanzania and we have a vision for all Tanzanian people to have affordable access to basic healthcare. MEA currently has nearly 175 community healthcare workers that have been trained to identify common ailments in patients and to treat them. Community healthcare workers are members of the villages in which they work and
they are committed to increasing the health of their friends, family, and neighbors. By acquiring training to be a healthcare worker and medicines from MEA at no cost to them, they are providing access to the treatment of common, but potentially serious, ailments like: conjunctivitis, pneumonia, worms, gastroenteritis, anemia, headaches, dehydration, scabies, and we are in process of expanding our program to include testing and treating malaria as well. Our community healthcare workers often have additional jobs also, but they sacrifice more of their time for the benefit of their village. Even if that means the patients are treated for free. No one is told no. At the rural level in Tanzania, many people let their medical conditions go untreated and seemingly minor issues can turn into much larger health concerns. These issues may go untreated for a variety of reasons like lack of funds, having no time or energy to travel to a clinic that may be several villages away, or they may have complacency to the disease. Our community healthcare workers provide affordable access within many villages. They not only treat the disease, but they educate their fellow villagers to prevent the diseases by having improved nutrition, increasing water sanitation, using a bednet, and educating people about prompt treatment in order to lessen the opportunity of spreading various diseases. The community healthcare workers keep careful track of how many patients they see and how many occurrences they see of the same diseases. With this knowledge, we as an organization can see where we need to increase our efforts with health education within the communities that we work with.
