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USAID awards $1.29 million grant to HealthPartners to reduce malaria in Uganda


Oct. 9, 2008

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. - The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) President's Malaria Initiative awarded $1.29 million to HealthPartners Uganda Project. The grant will go towards a program designed to train local residents in Uganda on how to prevent and treat those with malaria.

"Since HealthPartners first began working in Uganda in 1997, one of our key measures of success has been creating a Ugandan infrastructure that is self-sustaining," said Scott Aebischer, HealthPartners sr. vice president. "We have established an approach that has proven successful and look forward to expanding it into the new program."

Funded solely through the USAID grant, the new program will run from Oct. 1, 2008 through Sept. 30, 2012. The training will include educating local residents on simple yet proven prevention practices including using protective bed nets.

To date, the Uganda Project has held 15 community volunteer training sessions that attracted nearly 450 attendees. Aebischer adds that the volunteers then held sessions to educate the community and help them adopt life-saving behaviors. Those sessions have helped more than 131,600 Ugandan residents.

The HealthPartners Uganda Project has been improving the health and financial security in the Bushenyi district of Uganda since 1997. The project has received more than $3 million from USAID to provide medical assistance to women of child bearing age, children under five years old and women with HIV. In addition, HealthPartners has worked with local stakeholders to establish the Uganda Health Cooperative, a community-owned, prepaid health care cooperative.


About HealthPartners
Founded in 1957, the HealthPartners (www.healthpartners.com) family of healthcare companies serves more than one million medical and dental health plan members nationwide. It is the largest consumer-governed, nonprofit healthcare organization in the nation, providing care, coverage, research and education to improve the health of members, patients and the community. For the third year in a row, HealthPartners is rated one of the best commercial health plans in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, NCQA's "America's Best Health Plans 2007".

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