The hospital ward is hot and stifling, and Madina Sabit fans her daughter Tana with a piece of cardboard. The 2-year-old is weak but slowly recovering from one of the biggest killers among children in Africa: malaria.
“I’m always afraid that I’m going to lose one of my children to the disease,” Madina says. “It’s our biggest problem here.”
Madina has lived in the Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya since 2014 when she was forced to flee a fierce civil war in neighbouring South Sudan. She is one of an estimated 300,000 people from across the volatile East Africa region who calls Kakuma and the nearby refugee settlement of Kalobeyei home.
Like most refugees here, Madina and her children live in a small makeshift shelter with little protection from the elements. Mosquitoes, which carry the malaria parasite, thrive in the camp.
“We sleep under nets, but the children are playing outside in the evening so it’s very hard to stop them from getting bitten,” she says.
The situation is particularly bad during the rainy season, due to the stagnant water which provides a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.
“During the same period, there is also a spike in water-borne diseases and malnutrition, which weakens the immune system, making people more susceptible to malaria,” says Frida Gakii, a nurse at the hospital, which is run by the International Rescue Committee, one of many humanitarian organisations funded by the European Union in Kenya.
“At the same time, malaria infection can worsen malnutrition because children lose their appetite.”
Each year, some 250 million people contract malaria yearly, resulting in over 600,000 deaths, most of them children. It is the leading cause of death in many African countries and the continent accounts for 95% of all deaths from malaria globally.
Meanwhile, scientists have detected resistance to artemisinin, a key malaria drug, for the first time among children in Africa.
“Climate change is also increasing malaria transmission since mosquitoes thrive in warm and wet weather,” says Clément Cazaubon, who oversees EU humanitarian programmes in Kenya. “But the disease is preventative and curable, so investing in malaria protection is a relatively easy way to save lives.”
To combat the disease, the EU and its humanitarian partners train local health workers to identify and treat possible malaria cases, as well as educating communities on how to protect themselves. Spraying chemicals to stop the breeding of mosquitoes is also an important part of the EU’s preventative measures.
Despite this, overcrowding and inadequate sanitation nonetheless lead to thousands of new infections in Kakuma every month. This is the third time Tana has been treated for malaria.
“And she will be fine this time as well,” Gakii says.
