In Nkhata Bay North, four in five households don’t have clean water for drinking and washing. 60% of families don’t have access to safe toilets. One in every eight adults is also HIV-positive so nearly every household is affected by HIV or AIDS in some way.
At the same time, the area is so remote that it’s difficult for people to access healthcare facilities or receive health education. Some communities are a nine-hour walk from the closest clinic. Many work and school days are lost to easily preventable diseases.
Through several different projects and programmes Temwa is supporting communities in Nkhata Bay North to improve their health outcomes.
Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR)
Temwa’s Pa Mushunguti project aims to reduce the vulnerability of young people in Nkhata Bay North to sexual and reproductive health risks, such as early marriages, unsafe abortions, teenage pregnancies and STI’s. Through our community-driven approach, Temwa is supporting youth clubs in schools and communities to encourage young people to challenge harmful cultural norms and taboos and make informed decisions about their sexual reproductive health and rights.
Read our End Of Year and Mid-Term reports.
Access to clean water, hygiene education and better sanitation
Temwa has supported improvements in WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) for many years. Our approach was to support communities access simple ceramic water filters to protect people from waterborne diseases. Families paid a contribution towards the filters, and the revenue from the sales of the water filters was re-invested in other health initiatives, chosen by the communities themselves, including under-5 health clinics. Alongside this, the WASH Project delivered hygiene and sanitation education and built demonstration latrines so that families could replicate construction of latrines in their own homes. Between 2024 and 2026, our WASH Project reached 6900 people across three locations in the lakeshore areas of NkhataBay North, distributed 1200 water filters, and households exposed to WASH promotion strategies had approximately 60% lower chances of reporting disease occurrence than households that were not exposed Over the last year, Temwa has taken a pause to evaluate the effectiveness of our WASH approach to inform future efforts.
The 3 year evaluation report is available here.
Recently Completed Health Projects
Strengthening Community Run HIV Services
Following the success of our ‘provider-initiated HIV testing and counselling’ project at 5 local health centres in Nkhata Bay north over the last few years (which means that everyone visiting a clinic is now offered a HIV test), Temwa extended the project into the community itself. We supported regular outreach clinics in remote and ‘at-risk’ communities to enable community members to access vital health services and HIV testing. We also provided contact tracing and offer counselling and support to those testing positive which will help reduce the spread of the disease.
Take a look at our final report here.