Mr. Viengkeo Phasavaeng, a 43-year-old resident of Paheung village is proud to be a front-line malaria fighter in his village. Paheung village is in Lamarm district of Sekong province in Lao PDR, which takes a one-hour car drive from the nearest health center on mountainous terrain.
He has been volunteering as a village malaria service provider for the past five years. Being a resident of the village, Mr. Phasavaeng has been providing malaria prevention and treatment services to more than three hundred population in his village.
For a malaria high burden village where more than ninety percent of the population work and sleep in the farms and forest for their living, malaria is not a stranger. Once infected, its symptoms could be severe enough to disrupt everyday activities, causing economic and social loss to the infected persons. It could sometimes be serious enough to be fatal. Early diagnosis and receiving specific anti-malarial treatment within 24 hours are the key to preventing all these detrimental consequences. In a remote village like Paheung village where the transportation to the nearest health center is grueling particularly in the rainy season, having a village malaria volunteer is a lifesaver.
This is where Mr. Viengkeo Phasavaeng’s role as a front-line malaria worker has proven to be critical. As a community volunteer selected by the community to serve its own people, he is the go-to person for the village residents whenever they have malaria-related symptoms. For any patient who meets the criteria, Mr. Phasavaeng would offer malaria testing and provide anti-malarial treatment to those who were malaria positive. For those who were malaria negative, he would provide ancillary treatment or refer to the health center as needed.
In addition to providing malaria testing and treatment services, Mr. Phasavaeng is the community mobilizer delivering regular health education and behavior change communication messages to his fellow village residents. He does these because he knows that community mobilization and behavior change communication are important elements in malaria control by encouraging people’s early treatment-seeking behavior.
Mr. Viengkeo Phasavaeng is proud to be the village malaria volunteer. He is dedicated to the extent that he had not been sleeping overnight in his farm because he was concerned that he would miss any malaria suspect who would come to him for testing. For him, the monetary reward does not matter because the monthly incentive that he receives for his malaria service is minimal and nowhere near to compensate for all of his lost time from providing malaria services.
His altruistic behavior comes from intrinsic motivation, the motivation to be the front-line malaria service provider, the motivation to cure people of malaria and the motivation to bring down the malaria burden in his village. He takes pride in what he does and believes in the good work that he is putting in. He is a true community hero and volunteers like him constitute the backbone of the malaria program in Lao PDR, upon which the program’s success relies.
As of December 2020, the national malaria program together with the Civil Society Organizations in Lao PDR has been supporting a network of close to 2,000 village malaria volunteers. From 2018 to 2020, village malaria volunteers have tested up to 30% of the total country’s malaria testing and treated up to 35% of the total country’s malaria positive cases.
UNOPS, as the Principal Recipient for the Global Fund’s Regional Artemisinin-resistance Initiative 2 Elimination (RAI2E) grant, has been supporting the National Malaria Control Program, Ministry of Health and several other implementing partners in Lao PDR since 2014. From 2018 - 2020, RAI2E has funded the continuous training and follow up support for close to 2,000 village malaria volunteers in the entire country.
