Oluwamayowa Salu

Nigeria

Salu is the founder of The Iba - Malaria Eradication Foundation - an NGO with mission to combat malaria. Salu's involvement in the fight against malaria is testament that passion and commitment to a goal is an essential ingredient to achieving success. Salu, due to his personal experience with the disease, his many battles in the hospital and eventual loss of some of his primary school education to the disease made him start his organization. Salu is an innovator. Since 2012, he has partnered with major local and international organizations to combat the disease. He has received support from the Pollination Project, Exxon Mobil, the German Embassy Nigeria, the US Embassy Nigeria, the Lagos State Ministries of Health and Environment, The International Red Cross Society, and several media organizations in Nigeria. Salu focuses on rural areas with special concentration on women and children. As a health advocate cum activist and an emerging voice in the fight against malaria, Salu strongly advocates for health equity and rural areas and poor people health coverage - simply means, combining the four factors of Place, Product, Price and Promotion to ensure malaria does not continue to serve as an impediment especially for the poor. There are still so many people in Africa who believes Malaria is caused by bad food or water, staying under the sun or even thinking it is spiritual hence Salu's strength in and appetite for strong advocacy and community focused education. Salu understands how powerful conventional and social media is to break the cultural, language and general indifference of people about the need to #DefeatMalaria and hopes that the many impressive ways that he has introduced innovations and galvanized support to #DefeatMalaria can eventually bring an end to the disease . He has mobilized and recruited hundreds of youth volunteers through social media to help in conducting environmental sanitation exercise in the dirtiest communities and to distribute thousands of Long Lasting Insecticide Treated Nets and anti-malaria drugs. His impressive, innovative programs and passion to eradicate malaria has earned him accolades from reputable organizations like the National Youth Service Corps, the Commonwealth, the Mastercard Foundation, the International Youth Foundation amongst others. His quest to ensure everyone is educated about malaria resulted in him building a malaria mobile app available on Google Play Store to educate people about malaria. Salu is at the final stages of publishing a malaria comic book which is designed for in-school and out of school students in all the 54 Sub-Saharan African Countries especially endemic countries, and which will be translated in major languages spoken in Africa and the Asian continent. Salu is a 2012 Commonwealth Youth Awards African finalist, a 2013 Carrington Youth Fellow, 2014 Social Entrepreneur Transforming Africa Fellow and a 2015 Mandela Washington Fellow. He was recently elected the President of the Mandela Washington Fellowship Alumni Association of Nigeria.

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