Kalyppo Kares, a flagship social responsibility effort by Kalyppo fruit juice, has offered free preventive health screening for over 200 children in Madina.
The exercise, which is the first in a series of preventive health screening exercises scheduled to take place in specific locations in the Greater Accra region, over 200 children in Madina and its environs being offered free preventive medical screening at the preset Basic School park.
The Children were given education on self-breast examination, oral hygiene, care at the menstrual stage and education on other health related issues.
Speaking to Business Day on the purpose of the exercise, Mrs. Sara Nana Yeboah, a nurse and CEO of Sangy Nursing Services explained that the project was aimed at ensuring and inculcating in children preventive health attitudes instead of the typical curative ones.
“We are not screening for Illnesses. The basic concept for this is preventive health for children and so we don’t want to wait till they get sick. We are looking at oral hygiene, personal hygiene, self-breast examination and care at the menstrual stage. So this exercise is just bits and pieces of the totality of care for kids”, Mrs Yeboah stated.
She further noted that though they had had complaints of waist pains from some of the children, they believed there could be an underlying cause to the problem.
“So far we’ve had some of the children complaining of having waist pains, severe headache and palpitations. One would marvel how a thirteen year old girl will complain of waist pains at a very early stage but sometimes it may be an underlying cause. It could be something that is trying to come up. We screen and ask questions such that if it falls in line with what we are trying to get, we tell them to go and talk to their parents to see a doctor”, she added.
According to her, though, stroke, diabetes and some other ailments were formerly associated with the aged, trends have changed in recent times with teenagers being affected as well, hence her outfits collaboration with Kalyppo to help curb the situations at an early stage.
Chris Nana Ampadu, Project manager for Kalyppo Kares explained that with their products targeted towards children, the company strategically planned its corporate social responsibility program to benefit children in deprived areas in Accra.
“Looking at our target market, our efforts were to ensure that our corporate social responsibility, Kalyppo Kares for kids – which is a free health screening -, is geared towards children in the most deprived areas in the country using the 2010 population census as a point of reference. What we are currently working on is a pilot for four weeks and we are looking at Madina, Kwabenya, Jamestown and Tema. Depending on how the pilot goes, our heads have promised us that if it is successful, they will then move the project to other communities across the country for a one year period”, Mr. Ampadu said.
He stressed that though they had targeted to screen 200 children, the turn up had been overwhelming with over 250 children registering.
The pilot project is in two parts comprising the health screening and talk section and entertainment section which would entail bouncy castle, musical chairs, face painting among other activities with a lot of prizes and giveaways.
Kwabenya is set to benefit from the next Kalyppo Kares project on the 22nd of August 2015, at the Kwabenya Community Library from 9am to 5pm, with Jamestown and Tema Community 1 slated for 29th August and 5th September 2015 respectively.
Kalyppo is the flagship natural fruit juice brand from Aquafresh Limited. Aquafresh Limited is a manufacturer and marketer of packaged food products and non-alcoholic beverages in Ghana.
The Kalyppo brand launched in 1998 is for children of all ages, but especially for those aged 4 -16 years old. Kalyppo has no added preservatives.
