Over the last year, your investment in SolHealth has created a ripple effect of change in rural communities across the Gambia.

Since 2018, our rural healthcare revitalization project has transformed the lives of thousands through initiatives centering clean water, sanitation, and community-based health care.

This October, our international team travelled back to the Gambia. With our local staff and Gambian-based Board of Directors, we visited each of the communities and stakeholders that we have engaged through our sustainable partnership model, and witnessed the incredible achievements that have been made over the last few years. We were amazed by what we saw.

When we visited the village of Munsanding Kunda, we met with the local Village Water Committee – a group of local residents that is charged with the operation and maintenance of the water system. The Committee collects money from each of the households that use water, so that when the system needs maintenance or repair, funds are available to ensure it gets fixed. Although committees like these are set up in every community with shared utilities, not all of them function well.

With no small measure of pride, committee members of Munsanding Kunda shared with us that their bylaws and method of collecting user fees from villagers were so successful that neighboring villages had begun to emulate their system. They shared how they were frequently loaning out copies of their bylaws and advising other communities on the collection process. This shows that the systems we have set up in one village are having a ripple effect on other communities. This is the power of sustainable change.

In the Central River Region (CRR) village of Sare Babou, our visit coincided with a ceremony marking the completion of the borehole well and its handover to the local community. We were thrilled to find that a Member of Parliament representing the CRR travelled from the capital to attend the ceremony in what we learned was his home village.

He shared with us that he was so moved that people with no ties to his small community had chosen to invest in its wellbeing, that he felt obliged to invest in it too. As a result, he offered to fund the first three months of the Village Water Committee’s operations. This is the power of local ownership.

These are just a few of the inspiring stories that we wanted to share with you – but the impact of our work goes far beyond these anecdotes.

In 2023, your support helped ensure:

5,300 rural Gambians with a clean and accessible water supply
600 people with access to closed composting latrine facilities
4 Village Water Committees with training on water facility management and operation
180 clinicians with access to a regional ECHO hub – a virtual community of healthcare practitioners where clinical challenges are shared, and members are connected to their peers in rural placements.

We also had the immense honor of seeing Fatou, one of the community health nurses whose training we sponsored and who has already been deployed to a rural posting. Fatou has been serving a Kiaf Health Center for over a year now, in the village where her father was born, caring for a high volume of patients with incredibly scarce resources.

On the day we visited the clinic, there was no electricity. Standing under the sun in the sweltering heat, we were told this is not uncommon, and that this small team often has to deliver babies under candlelight. This underscores the need for continued investment in the infrastructure of these clinics and dwellings of the nurses.

While The Gambia has many schools and opportunities for education, many of those educated leave the country to work in places with more resources and better infrastructure. Although Fatou shared that she is determined to stay and give back to her father’s village, nurses like her are at risk of leaving their posts if the conditions they face do not improve. That is why we are investing in providing electricity and other needs for nurses in 2024. This has been part of our plan from the very beginning, because we knew that sponsoring their education would not be enough to retain the nurses in their rural posts and ensure that tens of thousands of rural families have access to basic medical care.

Your gift this season has the power to create a ripple effect of change in the Gambia – and just one donation has the potential to multiply into impact for thousands.

We hope you will consider renewing your gift today, and enable us to fund critical infrastructure improvements to keep nurses at their posts, and reach even more families in the most remote and underserved regions of the Gambia.

Thank you.

About

SolHealth was founded in 2016 by Dr. David Rutstein, former Acting Deputy Surgeon General of the United States.

His goal was to leverage his decades of expertise, and that of his extensive network, into a small, focused organization working to promote health and prevent disease, one population at a time.

As a global organization, SolHealth maintains a core Global Board of Directors, in addition to a local board in the country where we are operating at the time.

Create a Ripple Effect of Change in the Gambia

By SolHealth

Create a Ripple Effect of Change in the Gambia

Team Members