USAID/Guinea: In Dabola, Family Planning With a Familiar Face

MARCH 2, 2006

In Dabola, Family Planning With a Familiar Face

Once purely volunteers, community-based distributors are organizing to improve delivery of family-planning products and health services.

DABOLA -- When communities in and around this central Guinean city recently were asked to identify volunteers to distribute family-planning products for a USAID project, it didn't take them long to find Katherine Koulibaly and her friends.

Koulibaly and several of her colleagues already were active with their local health centers, having performed a similar role for Africare about four years ago. The USAID-funded project is being implemented by PRISM (Pour Renforcer les Intervensions en Santé reproductive et MST/SIDA), a unit of Management Sciences for Health of Boston.

"I said to myself, let's get my friends together," said Koulibaly, gesturing to four women -- Ramatoulaye Diaketé, Fatou Kaba, Poré Dialla and Fadima Diarissou -- who gathered recently at Dabola's regional health center.

Katherine Koulibaly, Ramatoulaye Diakité and Fatou Kaba are three of 15 community-based distributors working in the Dabola prefecture.

Now, in an effort to improve long-term sustainability of their work, the 15 "community-based distributors" are seeking to transform from an ad hoc group of volunteers to a committee with official government recognition - and the ability to accept public and private contributions.

Koulibaly and her colleagues, several of whom run small commercial operations in Dabola, already generate a small amount of revenue from reselling birth-control products procured by PRISM: for example, selling condoms purchased at 10 Guinean francs for 25 GF.

But expenses, particularly the cost of transportation to outlying villages in the Dabola prefecture, eat up most of the income. So each committee member chips in 1,000 GF at a monthly meeting at Dabola's regional health center in order to help defray these costs.

The women also help each other by sharing stories and, when needed, by going door-to-door explaining birth-control methods and benefits, said Koulibaly, adding that the need for education is particularly acute in rural villages outside Dabola.

The women also provide other health services, including distribution of medicine to treat Guinea Worm Disease, administration of Vitamin A supplements and referral of patients suffering from malnutrition.

Story and photo by Richard Stirba