Our Programmes
Our programs aim to build skills, improve physical and mental well-being, and ensure health needs are addressed. We work to facilitate positive opportunities for the disadvantaged and marginalized sections of our community, especially women and children, to generate a sense of optimism and hopefulness for the future.
Essential Aid
In urgent crisis situations, we serve to address basic needs by mobilizing tons of humanitarian, hygiene, and medical aid products and distributing them to affected communities.
Humanitarian Aid Donations
We ensure that humanitarian aid reaches those most in need. Our humanitarian aid donations include essential goods such as hygiene items, blankets, bedding, baby care items, clothing, and portable light devices.
Improving Access to Health Services
Health crises are often unpredictable, occurring at any place or time. They can cause significant human suffering and loss of life and can have serious economic repercussions. Communities are particularly vulnerable when national and local systems, particularly health systems, are unable to cope with the consequences of a crisis, often because a sudden increase in demand overwhelms the institutions involved. Populations affected by crises are more susceptible to illness and death from diseases, particularly diarrhea and infectious diseases.
Our Response: Improving Access to Health Services
Using our holistic model, we actively address endemic and emerging community health needs in Somalia, encompassing not only physical health but also addressing the psycho-social needs and delivering essential medications and treatment to those in need.
Our responses conform to the WHO Health System Building Blocks (HSBB) framework, which is used to monitor HSS through the identification of key inputs and immediate outcomes in the following areas:
Protection
It is our duty to provide adequate protection wherever we are capable because displacement can often be an unsafe and unstable process for many. With a focus on women and children, our efforts aid in providing empowerment, dignity and protection to those who need it most
Peacebuilding
Working in a nation that is emerging from years of conflict and instability, peace is at the center of all that we do. We hope to achieve a more prosperous and harmonious life for all. We hold peace as an integral part of development for any nation.
WASH
With the deadly combination of severe water shortages, poor hygiene, and sanitation services, including open defecation and lack of water treatment options driving the rapid spread of diseases, our WASH interventions are designed to reduce the risk of disease transmission in a variety of settings, including IDP camps, schools, and households.
Women Empowerment
With the recognition that women are often at the center of their communities and households, and thus are most vulnerable to adverse circumstances when being displaced or affected by war, we focus our programs on providing displaced women with skills, education, and livelihood opportunities.
Sustainable Livelihood
Sustainability is a key aspect of our work. Through social and environmental mitigation of hazards projects, we aim to strengthen families and communities to cope with situations of vulnerability while creating a better life and brighter future for the children.
Our actions include:
1) Ensuring immediate needs are addressed.
2) Conducting livelihood analysis to identify livelihood options.
3) Initiating appropriate livelihood support.
4) Facilitating the creation of cooperatives so that communities can negotiate a fair price with markets.
5) Mobilizing and federating communities, and fostering alliances with stakeholders to assert rights.
6) Strengthening women's participation.
Environment
Crisis situations, such as conflict or natural disaster, are often characterized by poor infrastructure, a lack of sanitation facilities, overcrowding, and inadequate access to safe drinking water. This exposes those affected by the crisis, as well as their host communities, to vulnerabilities stemming from environmental health risks. This includes individuals, communities, health care workers, waste handlers, and humanitarian actors. It is important to integrate the public health aspects of environmental healthcare, water and sanitation, and waste management into crisis response activities.
Climate Change Prevention
As climate change continues to worsen, we are more readily coming face to face with its damaging effects. We understand that true action against climate change starts at the household level, and it is for this reason we engage in restorative activities and sustainable practices.
We recognize that collective efforts are the key to creating resilient landscapes and communities that will protect future generations from climate disasters to come. HEAL provides cutting-edge environmental mitigation of hazards solutions in emergency responses by supporting measures that consider environmental health issues in the design and implementation of its emergency response. With an aim to reduce environment-caused avoidable morbidity and mortality by restoring local access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygienic conditions as quickly as possible and in a sustainable manner.
HEAL's environmental health response in crisis situations aims to:
❖ Reduce avoidable morbidity and mortality related to environmental health risks in the aftermath of a crisis;
❖ Ensure basic provision of water and sanitation services to displaced persons, migrants, mobile populations, host communities, and other crisis-affected populations;
❖ Provide community-based health education and implement preventive measures to improve the hygiene and health of affected populations; and
❖ Provide sustainable and community-managed solutions related to water and sanitation services immediately after a crisis situation occurs.
