Amaudo - Nigeria
Amaudo was founded in 1989 by Rosalind Colwill in response to growing numbers of mentally ill people roaming the streets of south east Nigeria. They offer a safe haven; a place for people to heal and be treated with care and dignity, to be helped to face a positive future, rehabilitated, trained in transferable skills to give them the opportunity to provide for themselves and if possible, reunited with their families and communities.
Specifically, Amaudo can accommodate 60 mentally ill residents with a team of 25 health care practitioners and support staff at their two centres. Rehabilitation takes place whilst residents and staff live, work, eat and socialise together. Rehabilitation can involve counselling, medication, training and family tracing.
Amaudo also provides community-based services and mobile mental health clinics. They work with local communities to raise awareness of mental health issues reducing stigmatisation and discrimination and challenge the government to ensure basic human rights. Their Community Mental Health Program (CMHP) is now a network of 70+ clinics in 4 states in southeast Nigeria in a pioneering collaboration with State Governments and other local stakeholders. Nurse-led clinics provide accessible and affordable care to people in their own communities. Amaudo now provides hundreds of placements each year to student nurses from across the region.
Additionally, an impressive new training facility was just opened in April 2023. It will provide residential accommodation for students to come and learn about mental health issues in a mental health setting. The centre's first guests, 75 student nurses, completed a week's course in May. There are plans to train church leaders, journalists and community psychiatric nurses later in the year, and Amaudo are currently in the process of trying to secure funding for these events to take place. They are also raising money to increase the water capacity of the whole Amaudo site to meet the needs of the new training facility.
Finally, the Amaudo weekly Radio show was launched in 2021 and has now broadcast over 100 episodes. The show is an amazing outreach tool and has a potential audience reaching across many Nigerian States. It has been a huge success in raising awareness, signposting people to help and getting people to talk about their own mental health, and has been commended by senior Nigerian government officials.
Amaudo is an innovative and ground breaking project nearly 30 years on, working on a shoestring budget and is a hope filled story we are thrilled to be partnering with. Your support of their work, whether via a donation, or by simply spreading the word, is deeply appreciated.
