Slum and Rural Health Initiative

Ruth works with the Slum and Rural Health Initiative, a non-governmental organisation in Nigeria providing vulnerable people and communities with vital health information.

The organisation’s work is preventative, giving people the tools and knowledge they need to make informed decisions about their health outcomes. It has a specific focus on non-communicable diseases, which accounted for almost 30% of all deaths in Nigeria in 2023.

Ruth and her team recognise that non-communicable diseases are usually the result of modifiable behaviours that are often initiated in adolescence. As a result, the organisation decided to target young people in secondary schools across five regions of Nigeria. The Adopt a School Non-Communicable Disease Campaign first trained local undergraduate students on what non-communicable diseases are, their risk factors, how risks can be mitigated, and other essential information that can impact community health outcomes. These undergraduates were then tasked with going to secondary schools and introducing a curriculum on non-communicable diseases to the students there.

The Adopt a School Non-Communicable Disease Campaign was funded by an AstraZeneca grant. As part of her AstraZeneca Young Health Programme Fellowship, Ruth attended the Summit in Belfast, where she built connections with other young leaders in health. She also learned significant lessons on community engagement which she has been able to successfully implement into her own work. Ruth subsequently put more emphasis on documenting her work as a result of her time at the Summit, while taking full advantage of AstraZeneca’s capacity building sessions and mini-MBA programme.

The Adopt a School Non-Communicable Disease Campaign trained a total of 172 undergraduate students in non-communicable diseases, of which 120 went on to support the secondary school outreach programme. In total, 10,273 secondary school students were reached across five states of Nigeria. Some of these volunteers have gone on to train their peers beyond the scope of the Adopt a School Non-Communicable Disease Campaign, while secondary school students who have been reached also passed information to their parents.