Tony Blair Faith Foundation

Hi, my name is Carole, and I am the project manager for Faiths Act against malaria in Sierra Leone. Right now, I am in London helping to train four new Faiths Act fellows. They'll be joining me in Sierra Leone. Here's an update on what I've been up to in Sierra Leone.

Starting in May, we all breathed a sigh of relief after the 'Faiths Act on Health to Save Lives' launch workshop in Freetown.

The workshop was a great success on many fronts, including:

- national religious and political support

- fantastic, consistent and participative attendance

- interfaith signing of the declaration to fight malaria

- 70 participants signing up to be Malaria Faith Ambassadors for their church, mosque or other organisation, which was more than twice our original estimate

Oh, and one of the biggest achievements is that we started each day on time!

There are, however, many big events like this that generate loads of enthusiasm and commitment and the danger is that very little happens afterwards, so….this is where the real work started.

Our next steps were to:

- form a first class training team (interfaith of course)

- develop an effective training programme for the ambassadors which could be delivered in a day

- organise, order and print all of the materials needed

- set up training sessions and then train all of these ambassadors for their new voluntary role

- collate and distribute all the materials

- devise the data collection system for the whole programme

- form a first class training team (interfaith of course)

The role of Malaria Faith Ambassadors (MFAs)

So what are these Malaria Faith Ambassadors (MFAs) and what will they be doing?

MFAs are essentially senior people (often the imam or pastor) in their church or mosque who volunteer to act as focal points for malaria prevention, education and advocacy. They hold the belief that malaria can be eradicated.

As part of this role they also commit to recruiting and training members of their congregation to become Malaria Faith Champions.

The champions are trained by the ambassadors to:

- talk about malaria with families on house to house visits using a picture story book
- promote which actions everyone can take to prevent deaths from malaria

'Day two' blog entry for 'Faiths Act on health to save lives'