Portrait of Diana, September 2025 Health Training in Entasekera, Kenya. Ann is the daughter of longtime Team Angaza volunteer Ann Muntati. Ann’s life-threatening bout with anemia during a pregnancy last year helped spark our launch of our expanded health trainings.
Expanding Health Education for Girls and Women
Severe health scares among several of our Team Angaza volunteers last year sparked our decision to expand our health education program in 2025. To date, we've offered three focused sessions to our staff and Team Angaza, covering topics including nutrition as it relates to anemia, diabetes, and pregnancy; prenatal care and obstetric emergencies; and gendered health challenges and GBV.
Each health training is being taught by Roselyne Sein, a Kenyan R.N. who is Maasai and who grew up in Olmesutie, one of our longtime partner communities in Loita. The course content is drawn from Roselyne's own experience in ICU and pediatric critical care nursing and from Hesperian Health's "Where There Is No Doctor" series. Each reference book in the Hesperian series is written by physicians with longtime experience working in remote, low-resource settings and intended to offer basic medical information and community health solutions to people living in remote areas far from definitive medical care.
We are already seeing the powerful impact of these trainings in improved health among our own staff. Equally important, these benefits are also beginning to ripple outward to girls and women within their respective communities. Many Team Angaza are now referring girls in their areas who get pregnant to clinics for prenatal care and sharing information about balanced nutrition to other local women. Ann, our Team Angaza for Olmesutie, and whose own life-threatening anemia during her pregnancy a year ago was key in raising our awareness about the depth and prevalence of medical complications during pregnancy, identified a woman near her village suffering from obstetric fistula. Ann visited the woman's home five times over the course of several weeks, patiently encouraging her that help was available in the form of a free surgery from The Fistula Foundation, which partners with hospitals across Africa and Asia to offer free, life-changing fistula repair and psychological support to women suffering from this devastating condition. We're excited to begin formally monitoring this program to see the impact we believe it can have in keeping girls healthy as well as in school.