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Inter-religious Program against Malaria (PIRCOM)

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The Inter-religious Program against Malaria, or Programa Inter-Religiosa Contra a Malaria (PIRCOM) in Portuguese, is a multi-faith organisation which has been working on malaria prevention and treatment in four of Mozambique's provinces since 2006. PIRCOM is the implementing organisation of the Together Against Malaria (TAM) programme, which brings together various non-governmental organsiations and faith communities, supported by the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI). The programme reaches out to community elders, leaders, and religious groups to ensure the quality and reach of health services and malaria messages through training.

Communication Strategies

PIRCOM works to train religious leaders on key malaria control and prevention messages so that they can reach members of their communities with malaria messages. The objective is to maximise the reach and influence of religious organisations in remote areas where government clinics and programmes do not exist. The challenge was to shape scattered houses of worship into a functional system for delivery of malaria control education and commodities, and overcoming geographic and religious differences. Partners recognised that the disparate faith-based organisations must be intentionally unified, organised, developed, and supported if the programme was to be an effective and sustainable mechanism for disease prevention.

According to PIRCOM, the programme has trained more than 21,000 religious leaders from a variety of faiths on malaria prevention and treatment. These religious leaders have in turn reached over 1.5 million congregants across Mozambique with malaria messages. Through PIRCOM, the religious leaders established a community network to complement national and multinational efforts against malaria, as well as other diseases and poverty-related issues.

PIRCOM activities also focus on spreading malaria prevention and treatment messages through house to house visits, advocacy with other community leaders, partnering with district health authorities, media work, and the creation and dissemination of information, education, and communication (IEC) materials.

C-Change is providing technical assistance to PIRCOM in social and behavior change communications (SBCC) and organisational developments, as well as working with PIRCOM in four high malaria-prevalence provinces (Zambezia, Nampula, Sofala, and Inhambane) to improve the skills of provincial, district and community-level staff to implement effective SBCC programmes for malaria prevention and treatment.

Development Issues

Malaria

Key Points

The Together Against Malaria (TAM) programme, arose in 2006 from the common vision of national leaders from 10 faith communities in Mozambique to use their religious organisations to disseminate malaria control messages and commodities

Partners

The Programa Inter-Religiosa Contra a Malaria (PIRCOM), USAID, Together Against Malaria (TAM), C-Change

Sources

PIRCOM website and USAID website on May 8 2012.