Petro Muonja, HSA, Nsanje Malawi
Petro Muonja a star HSA from Malawi
As a Health Surveillance Assistant (HSA) Petro Muonja serves a community comprising of 7 villages in Nsanje district in south Malawi. His contribution to the Ministry of Health’s child health goals in Malawi include assessing and treating sick under-5 children; immunizing under-5 children; providing family planning services, such as Depo-Provera; providing health education such as promoting use of latrines and proper waste management. Petro also well supports Sorgin health center with other tasks as needed.
At 26 years old, Petro is a model in his community and among his peers at Sorgin health center, thanks to his creativity and hard work. Petro follows IMCI treatment guidelines properly for which his supervisors are very proud. Despite living some 35Km away from his health facility in one of the hardest-to-reach areas in Nsanje, he uses his creativity to surmount logistics challenges he faces to ensure that his most under-served population have medicines for common, life-threatening under-5 conditions whenever needed.
According to his Coordinator, Hopson Ntenthaoga, Petro’s reports to Sorgin health center are always on time. When faced with a lack of reporting forms, Petro has improvised reports using available notebook paper. Petros is also using the JSI-supported mhealth tool called cStock to report his stocks of medicine without having to physically travel to the facility; he will get notified of availability of supplies to avoid ‘empty’ trips for such a distance. He walks some distance to the nearest network area to send his report. He is truly an inspiration to other others, even longer-serving HSAs, and he a classic pillar behind Malawi’s success in CCM.
