29 March 2024
A multitude of school-aged children and adolescents in school uniforms and their parents massed at Med-In Specialist Hospital, Ogudu, Lagos for yet another of the ongoing Temitayo Awosika Help Foundation’s Back-To-School, HFP and Know-Your-Genotype (KYG) programmes. For the parents and their children, it was as robust an Easter Saturday celebration as any, what with each student receiving colorful brand new school bags and other academic accessories.
The beneficiaries were not limited to metropolitan Lagos residents who were able to attend in person.. Thousands had registered online from across the country – registrations were from FCT, Adamawa, Enugu, Ondo, Edo, Niger, Kano, Oyo, Ogun, Rivers, and Kwara, to name a few states.
‘We will make adequate plans to attend to the other parts of the country in the coming months,’ says Dr. Sola Adebekun, TAHF’s Executive Secretary.
An item in the free school appurtenances would surely catch the eye and rivet attention: several exercise books customized to carry forward the Know-Your-Genotype message directly and subliminally. Whoever came in contact with that special item, be they parents, siblings, teachers, schoolmates or colleagues can’t fail to be touched by the KYG message, one way or another.
Right there in the womb, prior to delivery, a baby’s genotype can be ascertained,’ Dr. Adebekun told the audience at Med-In Hospital. By that parents will be better prepared to take care of a child with a special health challenge such as SCD and establish comprehensive measures to nip complications in the bud.
Dr. Sola Adebekun, Executive Secretary, TAHF
By forwarding the package across the length and breadth of the country, TAHF is doing and slowly achieving something not hitherto attempted by practically any SCD advocacy organization in Nigeria: accentuating genotype awareness in distant parts of the country, among diverse socio-economic groups at the same time. It is indeed a strategic pace-setting move.
In the coming months and years, having procured state of the art equipments for genotype verification, TAHF will further pursue its vision of making marriages in Africa’s most populous and the world’s most SCD-endemic nation more genotype-sensitive.
For those who may have missed the boat by having gone into marriage sans anything resembling factoring in Hb, TAHF also has made provisions for prenatal genotype diagnosis.
‘Right there in the womb, prior to delivery, a baby’s genotype can be ascertained,’ Dr. Adebekun told the audience at Med-In Hospital. By that parents will be better prepared to take care of a child with a special health challenge such as SCD and establish comprehensive measures to nip complications in the bud.
More and more, the organization named after Temitayo Awosika (1980 – 1999) positions itself on the vanguard of robust SCD awareness and advocacy in Nigeria.
TAHF’s vision and philanthropic goals are supported by the one and only Access Corporation.