Health and Nutrition

Nobody should die from preventable diseases. We focus not only on the treatment of malnutrition and disease, but also on preventing them from ever occurring in the first place. We believe an investment in health care – especially maternal and child health – is vital to prevent illness and disability.

We also believe that a healthy population is a productive one; better able to move out of poverty and towards a prosperous future. We train Community Health Volunteers to screen children in their locality for the most common illnesses – malaria, diarrhoea, and respiratory infections – and equip them to provide either basic treatment or referral to a clinic.

Our community health systems focus on women, newborns, and young children (particularly during the critical first 1,000 days of their lives) to both prevent and treat malnutrition.

Concern has a large Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programme that is operational in 22 countries across a number of diverse contexts.

For the WASH sector, we aim to achieve significant and lasting improvements in the lives of the extreme poor through the establishment of a whole range of services including access to safe water, safe disposal of faeces, adoption of new hygiene behaviours and solid waste management, amongst others.

Sustainability is at the forefront of what we do and we take a number of different approaches to ensure that local systems are strengthened throughout our work. We always make sure that the needs and preferences of the future users are taken into account and engage with all national WASH stakeholders (public and private) to secure the long-term future of these new services. Our teams have also established rigorous procedures to maintain the high quality of the infrastructure.

These approaches have been met with success and one example of this is the DRC WASH Consortium, led by Concern Worldwide. Between July 2013 and March 2019, the Consortium supported over 650,000 people in rural areas across seven provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo with access to a sustainable supply of clean water.

Nearly 1,000 young women and girls are infected with HIV every day and AIDS-related illnesses are the leading cause of death among 15 to 49-year-old females globally.

HIV is a cross-cutting issue within our programmes. Due to its multi-sectoral nature. HIV requires a response that both contributes to the prevention of HIV and mitigates the impact that HIV and AIDS has on the extreme poor.

In Bangladesh, Burundi and in Sudan, our teams and their national partners are responding to HIV and AIDS through targeted awareness raising, outreach sessions and HIV prevention education. Our HIV response in Ethiopia is integrated within the Livelihoods Programme and mainstreamed within the Emergency Nutrition response. 

Concern Kenya’s HIV response is in partnership with Sonke Gender Justice.