New Coronavirus related Recommended Charity — Development Media International (DMI)

At MyResonance we’ve been busy working with our charity research partners to understand how best our communities can help through donations. We are still learning a lot about the different interventions out there, which of these is already well funded and which is really making a difference.

As a result, we are adding new recommended charities to the platform and over the coming weeks, we will be giving you further information about them.

Our first organisation works in Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa has largely been out of the news as countries focus in on the impending crisis closer to home. The World Health Organisation has reported 60 deaths across the continent, however, this significantly underestimates the true number.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa their healthcare services are significantly under-resourced. To give you an idea it was recently reported that Mali, with a population of 17 million had one ventilator for its population. The number was later confirmed to be 56, that’s 1 ventilator per 303,000 people (the UK has 1 ventilator per 8,000 and we need another 30,000 ventilators).

So it’s pretty desperate out there and the best way we know to reduce the need for healthcare is through behavioural change of a population (isolating and washing your hands). And this is where our first charity; Development Media International (DMI) come in.

DMI runs evidence-based radio, TV and mobile campaigns to change behaviours and save lives in low-income countries. It is a non-profit organisation based in London, with regional offices in Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia.

They are the first organisation to demonstrate through two randomized controlled trials* (RCTs) that mass media can change health behaviours.

Development Media International (DMI) is proposing to conduct national radio campaigns to support the health communications response for COVID-19 in Sub-Saharan Africa. The priority countries for this work are Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania.

One of the key messages is washing hands. DMI has already broadcast WASH-related messages as part of various projects in Burkina Faso (including in a child survival RCT which saved an estimated 3,000 children’s lives), Mozambique, Tanzania, and Burundi.

We think they are great and so do some of the most respected charity research groups who have given DMI some great praise:

If you are interested in empowering your employees to make a difference and donate to some amazing charities you can download MyResonance and create your own Impact Currency here.

Wishing you and your families the best of health and happiness.

*Randomised Control Trials (RCT’s) — They help identify whether an intervention results in changes in outcomes. RCTs randomly assign people into two groups: ‘treatment’ and ‘control’. The intervention or change is applied to the treatment group but not the control group and the outcomes of both groups are observed.