Many students go abroad to exotic locales, complete some community service and then come home. Caitlin Cohen '08 and Erica Trauba '07.5 have taken it one step further.
In 2006, the two students started an nongovernmental organization called the Mali Health Organizing Project to address health issues in the slum of Sikoroni, which is located outside the city of Bamako in Mali, an African nation north of Ghana.
The group is largely guided by the students and an appointed group of Sikoroni community members known as the Community Health Action Group, Cohen said. It focuses on using local health projects as a means to garner mutual investment from both the Mali government and the Sikoroni community in their own healthcare system, she added.
The genesis of the organization came in July 2005, when Cohen and Trauba were both working on AIDS research in Bamako through the Global Alliance to Immunize Against Aids. Cohen conducted surveys on attitudes about AIDS in the marketplaces of Bamako while Trauba worked with a Sikoroni women's association, which was vocal about the need for a local clinic and for a concentrated effort to carry out local health projects.
To build on those efforts, Cohen and Trauba spent the following year fundraising in the United States and returned to Mali in June 2006 to begin work with the women's association on the local clinic. Cohen said they helped the community leaders devise a system to select a group of community members to guide efforts and worked to give them training exclusively from Malian organizations, in order to increase credibility and potential for sustainability.
"We kind of fell in love with Sikoroni and fell in love with Mali," Cohen said.
Cohen then decided to stay for the following year to help the group get off the ground. Within four months, Cohen had successfully created a nongovernmental organization that was incorporated in both the United States and Mali by the end of the fall of 2006 and achieved full legal and tax status in both countries in January 2007. "I did all the paperwork on my computer attached to a bus battery," Cohen said.
There are three branches of the group, which seek to address both health problems and their underlying causes. The core focus is upon health programs, Cohen said, the second branch offers support to the local women's empowerment program and the third is a micro-finance program designed to provide marginalized women, especially widows, with loans so that they can start their own businesses.
Currently the three biggest projects planned by the group are the creation of a town medical clinic, designing new trash disposal and waste sanitation systems and starting a maternal-child health program which is intended to supply marginalized women in the community with supplies and vaccinations for themselves and their children.
Cohen said the group acts as a fundraiser and negotiation facilitator for Sikoroni community leaders, helping them outline their goals for various health projects, then accompanying them to meetings with government leaders in order to successfully negotiate for funding and support.
"It draws the leadership in the community and the leadership of the government (together) into this community which they've usually forgotten, 'cause it's a slum," Cohen said. "We're an organization that's about using health to address the more intrinsic problems."
Cohen and Trauba said they think the NGO and its projects will be self-sustaining in the future because of the amount of involvement and support from the Malian community leaders, whom Cohen described as "some of the sassiest, most driven and wonderful women imaginable."
Both Trauba and Cohen said their time spent in Mali has guided their course of study at Brown, and they hope to get more Brown students involved to volunteer and eventually lead projects. In addition, the two said they would like to deepen Brown's connection with the group by getting some sort of University sponsorship.
Trauba and Cohen said they hope to inspire other students to go abroad and volunteer.
The group "would not be what it is had we not lived there," Cohen said.
Trauba cited her experience in Mali as one of personal growth. "Being in Mali has been sort of how I've grown up over college," she said.
