Tombana Mandeya: I love serving my community
“In our community, we no longer have home deliveries because I have managed to use my training as a village health worker to raise awareness among pregnant women."
Mutasa, Zimbabwe-Tombana Mandeya says that becoming a village health worker has helped her to raise a healthy family and contribute positively to community building.
Mandeya (38), a mother of four from Macheka A Village in Manicaland’s Mutasa District, has been a village health worker since 2012 after her community chose her to provide primary health care services.
She is passionate about promoting health-seeking behaviour from the family level, access to clean water, good sanitation and nutrition to build healthy families.
Mandeya’s primary focus has been on ending the scourge of maternal deaths and reducing the infant mortality rate through awareness campaigns that target pregnant women and their spouses.
“In our community, we no longer have home deliveries because I have managed to use my training as a village health worker to raise awareness among pregnant women on the importance of registering their pregnancies with health institutions and making regular neonatal clinic visits,” she said.
“In this community, men are no longer shy to accompany their pregnant wives to the clinic.
“Two of my children were born after I became a village health worker, and that experience helped me a lot as a mother because I knew how to handle my pregnancies and raise healthy children.
“When I went to labour, my husband was always by my side to render support, which is very important because it takes both parents to raise healthy children.”
Mandeya is proud to be part of the thousands of village health workers throughout Zimbabwe that are supported by the Health and Child Care Ministry, UNICEF and its partners, including donors of the Health Resilience Fund – the European Union, Ireland and the United Kingdom – as well as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
She links her remote community of Macheka A and the Chisuko Rural Clinic.
“The community settled for me to be their village health worker because I always volunteered for different programmes,” Mandeya said.
“I meet the community at least twice a month, where we educate each other about health issues we face at any given time, such as malaria, COVID-19 and measles outbreaks.
“I currently have 167 children under five that I am monitoring.
“I ensure that their mothers bring them to my homestead for weighing and for their Vitamin A supplementation.
“I would like to thank the Ministry of Health and Child Care and its partners, such as UNICEF, who have assisted us a lot, especially during the COVID-19 outbreak, for us to move around the communities to raise awareness about the importance of vaccination.”
She added: “I also want to thank UNICEF and its partners for assisting us with WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) projects.
“The drilling of boreholes and building of weirs galvanised the community.
“I mobilised the community to provide materials such as river sand and bricks to build the water reservoirs.”
She said Macheka A village recorded fewer diarrhoea outbreaks following the WASH interventions that guaranteed clean water supplies.
Mandeya has also encouraged women to set up nutritional gardens to provide balanced diets for their families at minimal costs.
Some of the challenges she faces as a village health worker include poor roads that make it difficult for her to do home visits.
Like most districts in Manicaland, Mutasa has a large concentration of indigenous religious groups whose doctrines discourage their members from seeking health services.
Mandeya said that due to health education campaigns that she regularly conducts in the community, some members of conservative religious groups were slowly changing their attitudes towards modern medicine.
She recalled an incident where she helped save the lives of four minor children suffering from measles after their mother defied her church and her husband to reach out to her.
“The mother secretly reached out to me, and we arranged to meet at a safe place where I organised for them to be attended to by health workers,” Mandeya added proudly. “I am happy to say we managed to save their lives.”
She said she overcame some of the challenges she faced difficulties her work because of the strong support she enjoys from community leaders, UNICEF and the Ministry of Health and Child Care.
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The Ministry of Health and Child Care, UNICEF and partners work in close partnership to empower the frontline health workers – including the village health workers and the professional nurses at the local primary health facilities – to deliver essential health services to the people of Zimbabwe entitled to. Current and past partners in the health sector include the donors of the Health Resilience Fund - the European Union, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance – as well as Australia, Canada, China, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, United States Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, Eli Lilly Foundation and Rotary.
