Northwest Medical Teams awarded $1 million grant to help people in Sudan
Barbara Agnew
Website: http://www.nwmedicalteams.org
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Northwest Medical Teams, in partnership with The Darfur Relief Collaboration, has received a $1 million grant to help thousands of families fleeing the violence in Sudan.
The grant was awarded by the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and will support displaced families living in West Darfur. The United Nations, which calls Darfur the world's worst humanitarian crisis, estimates that 2.2 million people in the region are without access to adequate food, water and health care.
The Darfur Relief Collaboration includes World Relief, Food for the Hungry, World Concern, MAP International and the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee. The DRC recently identified malaria as the leading cause of death in West Darfur, followed by respiratory infections, diarrheal disease and fever. Due to a lack of critically needed medicines and trained health care providers, thousands of people, many of them children, die of preventable diseases each week before they receive medical care.
Northwest Medical Teams, along with MAP International, will use $416,000 of the grant to train doctors, nurses, midwives and community health workers. This training will enable 67,500 people in the region to receive healthcare assistance and medicines. As security stabilizes in the area, Northwest Medical Teams plans to send five volunteer teams to the region during the next 12 months.
"We've been working in Darfur for a number of years," says Bas Vanderzalm, president of Northwest Medical Teams. "The situation is often dangerous but the urgent needs of people in the region are so great that we must do all we can to help. This grant will help us reduce sickness and death for thousands of people in one of the most troubled areas in the world."
The DRC received an earlier grant for work in Sudan from the Canadian Food Grains Bank for nearly half a million dollars. The grant focused on three remote villages in West Darfur that became home to thousands of families escaping the fighting.
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