Exciting News: Comic Relief Funds Welbodi

We are thrilled to announce that we have been awarded a large three-year grant from Comic Relief, a UK-based charity that supports global efforts to reduce poverty and social injustice. These much-needed funds will enable us to greatly expand our work at the Ola During Children’s Hospital (ODCH).

The bulk of the funds will go to support the Sierra Leone Institute of Child Health (SLICH), a collaboration between the Welbodi Partnership, the Ministry of Health and Sanitation, and ODCH. Through SLICH, the Welbodi Partnership funds ideas submitted by ODCH staff for how to improve service provision at the hospital. Alongside this, we will continue to develop desperately-needed postgraduate training programs for doctors and nurses. A small but important part of the grant will be spent to nurture new relationships with local communities, build on our understanding of community health needs, and empower community members to participate in the process of innovating and implementing new approaches to improve child health. Finally, we will invest in developing robust monitoring and evaluation systems to ensure that we track outcomes and remain accountable to the fundamental goal of reducing needless child deaths.

We are extremely excited about this new phase of our work, and we look forward to working with Comic Relief and with our wonderful partners at ODCH and the Ministry of Health and Sanitation to put this new funding to good use.