Nansio Hospital is a 162 bed hospital serving over 500,000 people living on Ukerewe Island in Lake Victoria in one of the poorest districts of Tanzania.

CACHA has been working in partnership with this hospital since 2007.

The nurses and doctors at Nansio have asked for help providing their patients with oxygen. Until 3 years ago they often had no oxygen at all.

For the past three years, a local volunteer in Ukerewe has been doing the 2-day journey hauling multiple canisters on the ferry and across the city to a filling station in Mwanza on the mainland in Tanzania. This costs about $400.00 every 6 weeks and although it has certainly helped, it is only a temporary solution that a group of donors in Canada have been funding. A longer-term sustainable solution is needed for Nansio Hospital.

Therefore, together with our Nansio Hospital partners, we have plans to implement solar powered oxygen concentrators so the hospital can generate its own oxygen. This has been done successfully in 28 other hospitals in East Africa and research has confirmed that it can be done in Ukerewe.
The hospital’s priority and now our plan is to start with the pediatric ward. This is important because pneumonia kills more children than any other infectious disease in the world.

• According to UNICEF, a child dies every 39 seconds from pneumonia
• In Tanzania 15% of deaths in children under 5 are from pneumonia

Having access to oxygen reduces the pediatric mortality of pneumonia by 35%. This project, at a cost of $15,000. will help the Nansio Hospital reduce the number of children dying from pneumonia.

Please help us achieve our goal and implement this project for the Nansio Hospital and the children of Ukerewe.

Thank you. Your support is greatly appreciated.

If you have questions or would like additional information about this project, please contact the CACHA project lead Karin Euler  [email protected] .