With Access’s strategic support, health centers improve and can better offer people access to the services they need.
Greater health center utilization, in turn leads to:
- more successful disease management
- healthier people, families and communities
- a model that can be expanded throughout Rwanda and replicated in developing nations worldwide.
Making systems work is a system that works. Even after only a few months of intervention in the Bugesera district, where the Access Project first focused its efforts at the health center level, the numbers say it all: strengthening the health centers is advancing the fight against AIDS.
In 2007, in the three districts where Access Project worked, more than 1,400 people were newly enrolled in ARV treatment. Throughout these districts the number of HIV tests performed nearly doubled from 73,000 in 2006 to more than131,000 in 2007
Looking ahead, the opportunity for impact is staggering. In the first quarter of 2007, Access Project was providing assistance to 32 health centers in three districts. In the coming year, the health centers in three more districts will be on the road to reaching their communities.
With this model of empowering health clinics - one by one, district by district - the goal of improving an entire country’s health comes within reach.
By equipping Rwanda’s remote health centers with management, methods and strategies necessary for success, Access Project is literally opening the doors for an entire country’s population to access to the health services they need. By improving health access, the Access Project is enabling healthier lives and communities; facilitating development and prosperity; and making a massive, sustainable, and scalable stride towards making the current crisis of AIDS, TB and malaria history - first in Rwanda, and then throughout the world.
