“I take my motorbike and I just go around my households educating them,” Nguta said. She is responsible for 20 families.
Gianaphina Mwende Nguta spends many of her days riding her motorbike around her village, checking in on the health of her neighbors. As a community health volunteer, she provides them with tips on nutrition and hygiene, refers them to the clinic or hospital, and gathers data, which she sends to the county government.
Gianaphina Mwende Nguta, a community health volunteer, rides her motorbike to visit homes in Uvileni village, Makueni County, Kenya.
Nguta also helps identify and refer patients for treatment of cleft since being trained in 2017 by Smile Train, a nonprofit organization that works with local medical professionals by providing training, funding, and resources to provide free cleft surgery and cleft care to children globally.
In hospitals that don’t have the capacity to perform the surgeries, the organization works to train and empower local medical professionals, often training and engaging community health volunteers to identify patients who need surgery. In-country, skilled surgeons perform the operations, while also training the local government health workers who will eventually take over this role.
When community health volunteer Gianaphina Mwende Nguta found out there was a baby with a cleft lip in her village, she put her training into practice to help the child receive surgery.