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This year Comic Relief has committed to spend £10 million to improve health and education services across Africa. And the good news is that, in support of the public’s outstanding contribution this Red Nose Day, the UK Government will match this with a further £10 million to support Comic Relief’s work in these areas.
The announcement was made during the BBC’s big night of Comic Relief TV on Red Nose Day itself, Friday 18th March, and means that Comic Relief can now double its efforts in improving healthcare and education services across Africa.
As well as enabling more children to go to school – giving them the education they crucially need – Comic Relief will also fund projects that work to improve the quality of the education that these children receive.
It will also mean that many more people across Africa will get access to essential healthcare and local people can be trained to become recognised health workers so that they can provide vital health care to families in the communities where they live.
Plus more families will get crucial access to services that help prevent and treat malaria - a disease that kills 2,000 children every day.
Currently Comic Relief funds a wide variety of health and education projects and, since the last Red Nose Day in 2009, nearly half a million insecticide treated bed nets have been delivered to households in western Uganda to prevent people from contracting deadly malaria.
Last year Comic Relief enabled almost 50,000 children and young people in Africa to access formal education and, in the last year alone, it has helped around 294,000 children under five in Tanzania to gain access to basic services in health facilities that have been supplied with equipment and drugs to save lives.
With this additional funding from the Government, Comic Relief can support many more projects like these across Africa to change, and save, lives.
