With Hope in Their Hearts and Medicine in Their Hands: Kadija and Hajara’s Journey of Service and Dreams.

In a small, tightly-knit community in one of the villages of Kano State, Hajara and Kadija, armed with nothing more than containers of life-saving medicine and their handwritten registers, Hajara and Kadija have become a symbol of care, consistency, and compassion in their community. They are Community-Directed Distributors (CDDs) for the Reaching the Last Mile (RLM) project, a role that many would consider small, but one that touches hundreds of lives every year.

“We don’t do it for the money,” Hajara says, adjusting her scarf after a long day of walking from house to house. “Sometimes the token we are given finishes before the work ends. But when you see someone recover… when a mother thanks you because her child no longer suffers, you forget the pain in your feet.”

Their work is voluntary and physically demanding. For weeks during mass drug administration (MDA) campaigns, the girls crisscross their communities under the blazing Kano sun. They walk for hours, making sure that even the most remote households receive treatment for neglected tropical diseases like onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis. Their reward is not found in financial gain, but in the visible impact of their work.

“We remember how people feared blindness of the eye (Onchocerciasis) and the swelling of limbs (Lymphatic Filariasis).” Some people didn’t know what was causing it. Now, they wait for us. They know we are coming with help.”

Though still in their early twenties, both young women speak with the wisdom and clarity of those who have witnessed transformation. They have watched neighbours regain strength, children return to school, and communities grow healthier, all from access to basic treatment that was once out of reach.

But even as they serve today, Hajara and Kadija are looking toward tomorrow. They share a quiet but determined dream: to become medical doctors.

“We want to study medicine so that we can do even more for our people,” says Kadija. “Right now, we can give the medicine, but we cannot examine, test, or treat complicated cases. One day, we want to be the ones our community calls when there is a health emergency.”

At the heart of the RLM project are people like Hajara and Kadija, quiet heroes whose stories don’t often make headlines but who are changing the course of health and hope in rural Nigeria.

Their footsteps may be small, but they are leading the way for many. And their dreams, born in dusty villages and fuelled by service, remind us that the future of global health isn’t just in big hospitals or capital cities. It’s in the hands of locals with courage, compassion, and an unshakable belief that every life is worth reaching.