HoverAid

Ashtead Rotary Club’s support for work in Africa has helped one of its charities – HoverAid - undertake medical safaris by using hovercraft to get into inaccessible remote villages in Madagascar.

The charity sets up clinics in difficult to access communities having completed 12 safaris with over 6,800 consultations. Treatments include dental work for patients, major and minor surgical procedures for those suffering from a huge variety of disorders - some quite serious – all done in areas where medical treatment is otherwise difficult to find.

While Madagascar is best known by chefs for its vanilla and by animal lovers for its lemurs and other unique species of mammals and reptiles, the island has evolved in isolation for millions of years with flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth. This isolation extends internally, particularly given that its population is one of the poorest in the world.

Some 20 to 25 million people live in rural Madagascar in areas with little or no infrastructure and their small road network constantly damaged by cyclones and flooding. This means villages are hard to reach and villagers often have no access to clean water and medication.

HoverAid, which is based in the UK and Netherlands, serves these communities using hovercraft – a unique form of transport that enables the craft to skim over both land and water so making access to far easier than by convention forms of transport.

Through Member Simon Ling, Ashtead Rotary Club’s International team have a direct contact with the CEO of HoverAid Trust, John Greaves, and have monitored the group’s work for several years. Their teams work hard making medical missions on a continuous basis with great success and it has been our honour to contribute funds annually.

 Please help us support HoverAid’s outstanding work. For more information visit their website: https://uk.hoveraid.org