World Humanitarian Day: CBC Health Services Assesses Breadth of Aid Services in Hard-hit Communities
The Cameroon Baptist Convention (CBC) Health Services has retraced the path covered thus far in rendering humanitarian services to Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and vulnerable communities, whose lives have been upended by the overstretched armed conflict in Cameroon’s Northwest and Southwest Regions.
During this year’s World Humanitarian Day, the CBC Health Services revealed that over 100,184 IDPs, as well as the affected in host communities, have received aid through her humanitarian programme dubbed ‘Rapid Response Mechanism’ (RRM).
According to Mrs. Ful Maurine, RRM Coordinator, the programme had five areas of interest; Health, Nutrition, Child Protection, Accountability, and WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene). While presenting an on-ground report to the Director, Prof Tih Pius Muffih and the staff of the CBC Health Services, Mrs. Ful said the CBC Health Services has gone a long way to restore the dignity of many IDPs and the affected, whose hope of survival had been dashed.
The World Health Organization (WHO) used the 2020 World Humanitarian Day to pay tribute to aid workers and humanitarians, who go “extraordinary lengths, in extraordinary times” to help women, men, unaccompanied and orphaned children living in crisis-stricken zones, often hard-to-reach.
Talking about hard-to-reach areas, the RRM Team knows this too well. Kumbo West and East in the Bui Division of Cameroon’s Northwest Region is a-no-go zone since the escalation of the Anglophone Crisis in late 2017. Mr. Kongnyu Emmanuel, RRM Site Coordinator has braved most of the odds throughout the stay of RRM’s intervention in this area. He says “offering humanitarian services in armed conflicts is life-threatening.” “You find your life hanging on a balance especially when you are caught in a crossfire. The bullet doesn’t know if are you a humanitarian worker and or not,” he added.
The diligence, bravery, perseverance, and self-sacrifice of Mr. Kongnyu and the entire RRM Team to serve and save lives in crisis-plagued zones is salutary. It is this kind of service that makes the world to qualify them as “real-heroes” on World Humanitarian Day.
The CBC Health Services’ RRM for over one year of its implementation provided newborn kits to nursing mothers for the first 28-days of life, Immunization to children who had not received even a single vaccine at birth, dignity kits to girls and women, psychosocial support to extreme vulnerable unaccompanied and separated children, WASH kits and non-food items.
Quizzed on the impact of RRM’s intervention on affected communities, Mr. Kongnyu said it is a general sense of needs met in time. “According to third-party monitoring, RRM scored a 72% success implementation rate,” revealed Mr. Kongnyu.
“This success is thanks to our impartiality as far as distribution of items is concerned. We offer humanitarian aid based on the degree of vulnerability in the affected communities. Once you were in need, we attended to you with no prejudice,” he stated.
Worthy of note is the CBC Health Services’ humanitarian programme is implemented in partnership with other organizations like UNICEF (United Children’s Fund).