The Ministry of Health has distributed bicycles worth over sh150m to Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs) in Lira District. 

Minister of Health, Dr Jane Ruth Aceng, presided over the distribution of the bicycles to 188 CHEWs on Saturday, September 9, at Lira City Council Hall. 

According to Aceng, the 196 bicycles worth sh850,000 each, were donated to the government by World Bicycle Relief through the health promotions and education department in the Ministry of Health. 

She asked the community health workers to keep the bicycles well and use them to facilitate their mobility to provide quality services to the community. 

Aceng urged the CHEWs to compile the statistics from the community to enable the country to improve the health standards of the people. 

 “I want to request you to be very keen on what is going on as regards health, not only in your area where you reside, but in the entire country because we compare statistics we want to know which area is doing well and where is not going well and why so that we improve the health of the whole country,” she noted, adding that this will help Uganda have a healthy people and that the economy also improves. 

On behalf of the government and the people of Uganda, Aceng who doubles as the Woman MP for Lira City, thanked the donors for their support. 

Maureen Kolenyo, the regional director for East Africa at World Bicycle Relief, said apart from solving the problem of lack of transport to move to the community to extend quality health services, the bicycles will go a long way in improving the livelihoods of the health workers. 

She said after distributing the bicycles, they will follow up after one year to assess the impact their donation created in the community in health service delivery. 

Kolenyo revealed that they are now working in six countries and so far, 800,000 bicycles have been distributed to help communities in the six countries deal with the challenges in the areas of health, education and livelihoods. 

The assistant commissioner of health promotion in the Ministry of Health, Dr Ronald Ocaatre, said facilitating the movements of the community workers in the country has been a great challenge and that this donation will help a lot in supporting the health workers to do their work effectively. 

He revealed that the health ministry has received a fund from the Global Funds which will greatly support them in strengthening health services right from the parishes to reduce the heavy burden on the people of the country and that in line with this, more community health workers will be trained in other districts. 

Lira City Mayor Sam Atul, Resident District Commissioner Lawrence Egole, and other city and district officials who witnessed the occasion said the bicycle donation will greatly motivate the CHEWs to do more as far as the health extension work is concerned. 

Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs) are the new government cadres that have been trained to promote disease-prevention behaviours among the community members. Under the pilot project, hundreds of community members were recruited, trained and passed out by the Ministry of Health in three Ugandan districts of Lira, Mayuge and Lira.