Sir, - In The Irish Times of July 26th Paul Cullen described a visit to the Weyra health clinic, constructed at a cost of £120,000 and opened last December.
Mr Cullen claims that "no-one told the Ethiopian government" that GOAL would be ending its involvement with the clinic after five years. This is incorrect. The project agreement between GOAL and the Ethiopian Ministry of Health (MOH), signed in June 1992, clearly shows that GOAL would hand over the health station to the MOH at the end of the five-year project period.
Mr Cullen failed to mention that the Weyra clinic operates as a base for the health outreach clinics which GOAL runs in 16 surrounding villages. The clinic serves the health needs of a total population of some 50,000 people.
The clinic is large, as your correspondent rightly pointed out. However, while Mr Cullen might appear to have a problem with this, the Ethiopian MOH does not. It issued new guidelines in 1995 for health clinics, changing its policy from building small health stations to larger health centres.
At the time of Mr Cullen's visit, GOAL was in the process of upgrading the Weyra clinic from a health station to a health centre, as requested by the MOH. He pointed out that the clinic's supply of medicines "fitted on top of a table". Non-governmental agencies are not allowed to import medicines into Ethiopia. All medicines must come through the Ethiopian MOH central pharmacy. An extensive medicine order was being processed at length by this pharmacy at the time of Mr Cullen's visit, and these were received at the clinic two days after Mr Cullen's visit.
Mr Cullen also refers to a generator at the clinic which was too expensive to run and "only came on at night". Refrigeration equipment for vaccines is powered by kerosene motors, and the generator is required only at night to light the clinic. If this is to become a sustainable MOH clinic - in which available generators are run only at night - GOAL believes it should mirror this practice.
For seven months before Mr Cullen's visit, GOAL had been in negotiation with the MOH - which was now concerned that it could not fulfil its part of the takeover agreement - about the clinic's future. To allow the MOH to take on its responsibilities more gradually - and ensure that it did not become "another white elephant" - GOAL agreed to fund the clinic for a further two years.
I make no apologies for this decision, nor for the decision to build this clinic in the first place. It has provided essential health services to a large and very poor community who would otherwise be denied access to medical treatment. It will continue to do so over the next two years and, with increasing input from the Ethiopian MOH, for many years to come. - Yours, etc., Fiona Quinn, Field Director, GOAL Ethiopia.