The Mothers Who Changed Our Healthcare Model
When our mobile clinic launched, we assumed we knew what communities needed. The women of Ndop told us otherwise. Here is what we learned — and how we rebuilt the programme around their knowledge.
Dr. Eunice Malange
Board Member, Healthcare Lead
When the Foundation launched its mobile healthcare programme in 2021, we designed it the way most health programmes are designed: with input from medical professionals, public health literature, and the priorities identified in national health surveys.
What we did not do — not adequately, not at first — was ask the communities themselves what they needed, in what form, and delivered by whom.
The women of Ndop corrected that.
“We arrived with a curriculum. They arrived with knowledge. The honest thing — the effective thing — was to admit that theirs was more relevant than ours.”
In our second month of outreach visits to the Ndop community, a group of mothers requested a meeting with the programme team. They came with a list. Not a complaint — a list. Specific, prioritised, and grounded in a depth of local knowledge that our programme design had entirely missed.
"We arrived with a curriculum," says Dr. Eunice Malange, the Foundation's healthcare board member who led the programme redesign. "They arrived with knowledge. The honest thing — the effective thing — was to admit that theirs was more relevant than ours."
The mothers' list included: the specific times of day when women could attend health sessions without conflicting with their farming and childcare responsibilities; the cultural protocols around maternal health that our male health workers had been inadvertently violating; the traditional remedies that community members were using alongside our treatments, which our team needed to understand to avoid dangerous interactions; and the three health conditions that the community considered most urgent, none of which were at the top of our original priority list.
The programme team spent three months redesigning the outreach model around this feedback. Session times shifted. A female health worker was recruited and trained. The curriculum was rebuilt to incorporate traditional knowledge alongside biomedical approaches. And the three community-identified priorities — malnutrition in children under five, maternal anaemia, and waterborne illness — became the programme's primary focus.
The results were immediate. Attendance at health sessions increased by 60% in the first month after the redesign. Community health volunteers — all women, all nominated by the mothers' group — became the programme's most effective outreach channel.
The Ndop model is now the template for every new community the programme enters. Before any curriculum is designed, before any session is scheduled, the team spends time listening — specifically to the women, who in most of the communities we serve are the primary health decision-makers for their families.
"The mothers of Ndop did not just change our healthcare model," says Dr. Malange. "They taught us what community-led development actually means. Not as a principle — as a practice."
