Maria Mukamana, 35, lives in Rugenge village Rusororo sector which is surrounded by miles of swamps and marshlands where she wakes up every morning to do a day’s labour in the rice fields.
She earns less than $1 (Rwf700) a day and spends it all on food for her children with not a penny to save by the end of month.
As a family living in the wetlands — a mosquito breeding ground —at least once in two months one of her family members gets infected with malaria.
The single mother of two children is among the 10million Rwandans who are covered by the Community Based Health Insurance (CBHI) commonly known in Rwanda as mutuelle de sante.
Under the CBHI program Maria can get 90% health care insurance which covers treatment and medication in case she and her children fall sick but this doe snot cover her needs like food needed to accompany medication.
“I have to struggle with getting food once one of us is sick. It gets worse if am the one having malaria, as that means days of going hungry and the children fed by neighbours,” Mukamana says.
For Mukamana getting malaria is partly her fault because she didnot register for a free mosquito net among the six million bed-nets distributed by government last year.
Medical experts say that this puts these categories of citizens into a zone of standing a risk of contracting malaria especially during the dry seasons despite the fact that Rwanda has introduced an iron hand in malaria control programs.
Mukamana’sarea is not one of the five districts in which the government launched a community based Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) program done by manual spraying which only covered high risk malaria areas like in Bugesera, NgomaKirehe, and Huye districts
However, the IRS method seems to be compromised by factors like insecticide resistance in vector populations causing a hike in malaria cases for a short period of time especially among Rwandans aged 18-35.
“Mosquitoes have become resistant to the spray…..,” said Dr. Aline Uwimana, the National Malaria prevention unit manager at the RBC.
Since not all areas were reached using IRS method, Rwanda health ministry says that they are now increasing the spraying activities to 12 of the 13 targeted districts using drone technology.
Even though health ministry statistics show that home-based malaria rates have increased from 50 per cent in 2018 to 57.1 per cent in 2019on March 10, 2020 Rwanda launched the first tech-driven fight against malaria using drones to totally wipe out mosquito lava before they get a chance to mature into adult insects.
The pilot phase will be conducted in six high risk zones by Charis UAS, a local drone company at a cost of over Rwf60million($63,070.079),replacing manpower and logistics that have been involved in IRS spraying.
Previously about Rwf1 to 2billion ($1m to $2m) per district was spent on one hectare of marshlands hand-sprayed by 500 men who have to carry the pumps for over three days, which comes with human error of spraying in wrong areas and contaminations.
With drone technology, Teddy Segore, Charis Drone Technical Director says that a mapping drone will be used to identify the mosquito eggs and another drone used to spray using the exact coordinate.
“With technology we cut costs in logistics, and human error in spraying will be minimized. We are taking the war to the mosquito breeding areas, instead of waiting for them to grow and infect more people,” said Dr. Daniel Ngamije, Rwanda’s Health Minister.
According to Ngamije, this program will cut down on malaria infections by 90% in the next nine years using drone sprays, continued capacity-building of health workers and prevention through mass mobilization.
This target could be reached as numbers of malaria related deaths have continued to reduce from 663 annually in 2015/16 to 264 cases in 2018/19, largely as a result of community health workers being able to handle 57% of the threemillion cases registered each year.
Coltida Mukakemenyi, a farmer and mother of three children who also lives in the swamp areas of Rugenge, has high hopes in the drone spray methodology as the disease has devastated her family.
“It is common to have all my children suffer from malaria at least once a month, because we live near the swamps and I am partly to blame for not using mosquito nets,” Mukakemenyi said.
Such instances of lack of mosquito nets as preventive measures will be eliminated as the government plans to distribute more than 7.5 million nets in the next three months, which started this February.
WHO targets require that all countries achieve a zero percentage of malaria infections and deaths by 2030.
WHO Global malaria figures in 2017 indicate there were an estimated 219 million cases of malaria in 87 countries, but in Rwanda malaria cases have decreased significantly, largely as a result of government measures.
WHO officials expressed fear over mosquito aerial spraying methods but health experts say that with drones, the spraying is precise and effective since it uses maps to detect exact areas to spray.
This is not the first time that Rwanda has turned to technology to improve access to healthcare services.
In June 2016, Rwanda become the first country in the world to use drones developed by Zipline, a Silicon valley company, in blood delivery services to health facilities reducing the time used by ambulances from over four hours to just 15 minutes from a blood bank to a health facility.
