Promoting Child Survival and Community Health

If you want an in-depth understanding of our approach, watch the videos in number order.

Besides the videos, we recommend a number of reference materials that we have found very useful. Read and/or download informational resources that are listed in alphabetical order under each video.

Check out other organizations that produce excellent materials to promote community health. We have learned a lot from them!

Introduction to MAMA Project Child Survival Training for Medical Brigades 2020

  • This training is geared toward health work in economically poor communities. The training grew out of a need to prepare medical brigades for their challenges but is also very appropriate for health and nutrition workers in clinics, community health workers visiting homes, care group leaders, traditional birth attendants, trained midwives, nurses, and even doctors.
  • These video resources are complemented by printable dosing charts, and supporting materials.

Hidden Hunger

  • Addressing the problem of world hunger as it most commonly presents – hidden in plain sight!
  • Unrecognized, and often unaddressed, this session reveals the role of the specific deficiencies and the problems that result in disease and death of vulnerable people, especially children.

Sons and Daughters of the Soil

  • Why do some diseases appear in some parts of the world and not in others?
  • Why did some diseases stop harming children in some parts of the world decades ago, but are still causing problems in others?

Vitamin A Deficiency Eye Disease and Noma

  • Overview of Vitamin A and its role in health and disease.
  • Focus on how horrible childhood illness that most people in the developed world have never seen, and many in the communities that see them do not understand the cause or how to prevent, detect early and treat to avoid death and disability.

MSF: Facing Noma

  • MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders) has worked in Sokoto Nigeria to do surgical repair of faces affected by noma.
  • This is an abbreviated version of their documentary “Restoring Dignity” filmed at the Noma Children Hospital in Sokoto.
  • We include this video to highlight their work to repair the damage that malnutrition has caused, while we focus on prevention by improved nutrition and hygiene.

Introduction to Refeeding Syndrome

  • Before launching into refeeding malnourished people, well intentioned programs need to understand what is happening in the body during starvation.
  • Too much, too fast can kill a person with kindness.
  • This session teaches you how and why to “start low and go slow” with restoring normal nutritional intake, and how to do it when there is not a well-equipped ICU or full service laboratory at your disposal.
  • Thank you, Dr. Sunday Palm!

Nutritional Rehabilitation

  • There are many programs running feeding centers and rehabilitating children.
  • We offer our recommendations and recipes that are based on WHO recommendations using fortification of locally sourced products, that can be used to produce appropriate foods that can provide the benefits of the F75 and F100 formulas promoted by WHO.

Peanut Butter Food Production for Malnourished Children in Tanzania

Water Filtration and Chlorination

  • Presentation on importance of water filtration and chlorination and recommendation of Sawyer system for homes, schools, clinics, brigade, and even hospitals.
  • Please refer to the printable materials below for recommendation on using chlorine tablets rather than liquids.
  • The dosing is important – too much or too little chlorine is a problem.
  • Keeping the water clean after it is filtered and chlorinated is critical.

SAFE Water Now Tanzania Water Story Shirati

  • This informative video was made in Shirati, Tanzania where MAMA is partnering with local health workers at the Shirati and RAO hospital, as well as NGOs.
  • It features another of the many ways to purify water in the home, besides the Sawyer Point One Water Filter (0.1 microns). 

Sawyer Point One Water Filter Best Practices: Train the Trainer Video

  • Excellent teaching tool to promote the use of point of consumption water filtration.
  • MAMA uses this filter, then adds the step of chlorination as shown in our session #7. Chlorination addresses viral pathogens in the water in addition to bacteria. Filtration addresses parasites.

Combatting Intestinal Parasites in the Community

  • Perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about parasites… but very important for community health around the world.
  • Promoting mass drug administration rather than individual case finding and testing.
  • Strategy intended for communities where Soil-Transmitted Helminths and Schistosomiasis are a public health problem.

Working with MOH on Deworming

  • Video produced to promote MAMA Project mass drug administration in Honduras in cooperation with the MOH.
  • Set in rural Honduran communities.

Schistosomiasis: The Deadliest Neglected Tropical Disease or The Worst Disease That You Never Heard Of

  • Almost unheard of or forgotten in much of the world, it is an example of the result of economic and health disparity in our world.
  • Deserves the focus and resources of programs that endeavor to tip the balance of justice toward communities facing this disabling life-threatening condition.

In the Rough: A Success Story from Sierra Leone

  • An informative video highlighting a means of addressing Schistosomiasis in a context that is not familiar to most of the world.
  • Included to inform and to inspire.

Assessing Nutritional Status

  • What we need to know about quantifying nutritional status in children and adults.
  • How to measure and interpret using field tools and WHO computer analysis software.

WHO Growth Monitoring

Video from WHO website that coaches health workers on proper techniques for weighing and measuring children to assess nutritional status.

Sharing Health Promotion Messages in the Community

  • A review of some of the basic common impediments to community health.
  • Being both a teacher and a learner.

A Micronutrient Story

  • Buffy the chicken has some good advice for humans on nutrition.
  • You might learn something from her.
  • Take good care of her and she will be a mother’s best friend.
  • Guinea hens can be best for many communities.
  • Check out MAMA Project Child Survival Fact Sheets on Family Poultry Flocks.

Introduction to the IMCI Chart Books 2014 & 2019

  • Integrated management of diseases of children.
  • A framework for systematic assessing, classifying and treating common illnesses in the community.

Oral Health and Child Survival

  • When oral health becomes a matter of life and death.
  • Focus on Noma as an example of the synergy of poverty, lack of access to medical care, lack of immunizations, and malnutrition causing Nutritional Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Community Outreach Event

  • Tips for organizing a Medical Brigade Event.
  • Incorporating Nutritional Assessment into the event, using low-cost portable tools.
  • Deworming.
  • Nutrition counseling.

Bicycle Pump Nebulizer (English)

  • Pneumonia is a major killer of children.
  • How do you know if a child is having an asthma attack or pneumonia?
  • If a nebulizer treatment clears up the respiratory distress, think asthma.
  • What if you don’t have a nebulizer or electricity to power it?
  • Got a bicycle tire pump? That works just as well!

Estimating Hemoglobin with Color Scale

  • One of the first questions that a health care practitioner wants to know about their patient is “Are they anemic?”
  • For over 100 years, doctors have used the Tallquist Color Scale to estimate hemoglobin.
  • Many doctors that are used to having laboratory facilities have never known that we can make a visual estimate unless we are color blind.