Together with colleagues from the Sonia Nabeta Foundation, they thought of a bigger, faster, and better way to best deliver the essentials. On a good note, they have since started delivering the much-needed insulin by boda boda
When the ban on public transport was introduced, a trained social worker, Ivan Okoth, foresaw the worst for diabetic patients in need of a daily dose of insulin. Until the lockdown, his time at the Sonia Nabeta Foundation working with Type 1 Diabetic (acronym, T1D) patients had seen him deliver the much-needed daily insulin with ease.
Like he had anticipated, a few days into the lockdown, he got a call from a T1D who lived in a municipality outside Kampala. She was out of insulin and was worried that she wouldn't make it through the day. Quickly, he reached out to another T1D in the same municipality who agreed to share part of his stock.
“What that meant, however, was that the second diabetic patient would also need his insulin replaced in just a few days,” he narrates of the predicament that birthed his giving initiative. At that point, he had started receiving calls from other patients (whom he refers to as warriors), looking to get their insulin refilled.
Ivan knew he had to do something or risk losing his warriors. “Since there was a ban on all public means of transport, the only option was to repair my bicycle and ride to the two warriors who first reached out,” he says. Once he made his first delivery, the calls increased and soon became more than he could manage. This meant that patients' health could easily get critical in a matter of hours; it worried him so much.
Together with colleagues from the Sonia Nabeta Foundation, they thought of a bigger, faster, and better way to best deliver the essentials. On a good note, they have since started delivering the much-needed insulin by boda boda (motorcycle taxi), an idea that will be taken on permanently by the foundation.
“The plan for the future is to extend this boda boda project and develop a network of delivery of these supplies to the warriors who already incur a lot of expenses on transport,” he says.
By CivSource Team