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| Head of Learning NALA Foundation |
Naomi Caplan is also known as the Mary Teresa (Angel) of Ethiopia for her ministry to improve the lives of disadvantaged youth and empower impoverished communities in Africa. Before she became famous Naomi worked in the USA in the field of child welfare and education and most recently in an organization that supports African asylum seekers in Israel. She joined the NALA Foundation team in June 2017 to combine her educational expertise with their passion for community empowerment and changing lives.
NALA Foundation Curing Diseases & Breaking the Poverty Cycle (NGO).
The mission of the NALA Foundation is to work to break the cycle of disease and poverty in developing countries. In terms of the Coronavirus, so right now in Ethiopia, the NALA Foundation, formed is working as a rapid response team with both members from their Israel team and country office in Addis Ababa, also known as Political Capital of Africa. Furthermore, they are working with local representatives in another five project sites. The NALA Foundation had a five-point plan First off, there was messaging.
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| NALA Foundation Health Education |
There is a lot of misinformation, in African countries, there is a big gap of information, so Naomi approached the messaging with a head-on approach. She and her team established radio-TV messaging, they did mobile messaging on a van with a loudspeaker, plus projected the messages in the rural communities that might not have the same access to technology.
Role OF NALA Foundation
Naomi with her team also did a lot of advocacies for religious leaders and local leaders in Ethiopia. She provided paints to churches so they can paint separation areas for prayer. Working with the health centres to identify needs in terms of infection, prevention, and control materials, so NALA Foundation provided health materials to the health centres such as masks, gloves, alcohol, gowns. Furthermore, they also built handwashing stations. These handwashing stations were locally constructed, resourced, built. They were operated on to prevent the spread of infection when they operated the faucets. And then NALA foundation also planning to do training for the Ethiopian health workers, so the health workers did receive training at the local level, so the foundation made training that addressed these gaps.
According to Naomi, the world we live in is very inter-connected we can't think of ourselves as in isolation. something that happens in one side of the world, as we've seen, spreads everywhere. So by helping Ethiopia, by helping the developing world, we also help ourselves.”
Naomi is someone from Israel, Tel Aviv. She thinks it helps from the perspective that if an Israeli is working for a good cause then people make so many issues and most of the time make them so political and complicated than it has to be.
As a Muslim blogger from Pakistan, I learned from Naomi that we all can zone in on these very simple things, take the politics out, and try to find simpler solutions, simpler ways that are very community-based. That helps the community that helps everyone in the end.