By Abdulkarim Ssengendo

OVER 50 community health workers in Isingiro district have received bicycles and phones to help them monitor patients in the villages.

The donation was given through the Millennium Development Villages Project funded by the UN Development Programme.

Isingiro LC5 chairman Ignatius Byaruhanga, who on Thursday launched the community health workers bicycle scheme, commended the UN for improving the lives of residents.

“Before the project came here, access to basic services like safe water, general infrastructure and essential medical services was so poor,” he said.

“Our area was a hunger spot with 20% of the children severely malnourished and generally unhealthy.”

Byaruhanga was happy with the standard of classrooms and health centres constructed under the project, noting that similar interventions had set up structures which collapsed within a short time due to shoddy work.

The project came to the district in March 2006 and piloted in Nyakitunda and Kabuyanda sub-counties.

Prima Innomugisha, who represented the beneficiaries, asked UNDP to extend the project by five years to other areas.

She was happy with the construction of a maternity ward, which had saved expectant mothers from travelling long distances to deliver.

“Our husbands used to carry us on bicycles like matooke, taking us to Mbarara hospital to deliver. We are also happy that they set up a theatre and gave us an ambulance.”

The project cluster manager in Ruhira, Dr. John Okorio, said 45,000 residents and 9,000 households had benefited.

The Millennium Promise executive director, John McArthur, said they would go to 10 other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

He commended the community health workers, saying they were the foot soldiers in curbing infant mortality and malaria.