In April 2023 I will be travelling to Botswana with a team of fellow type 1 teenagers and diabetes health care professionals from across the East of England.

Thank you very much for the very generous support that you have given to the Botswana Diabetes Partnership Project.

We are incredibly grateful for your contribution.

There have been some to the plans for the project in the last few weeks and we would like to take this opportunity to update you on these.

We have been aware right from day one that we are organising this project in the shadow of the global Covid-19 pandemic.  Thanks to the incredible science and the fast roll out of the Covid vaccine programme in the UK we are now in a position where we can return to a ‘normal’ way of living with Covid now accepted as a part of the world that we now live in. However this is not the case in a number of countries around the world. 

During discussions with our colleagues in Botswana it has become clear that their recovery from the pandemic is moving at a much slower rate to that which we are experiencing in the UK. They have still not been able to vaccinate children under the age of child and have restrictions in place regarding the holding of large scale face to face gatherings like our diabetes camp and the education symposium that we had planned to hold during the project visit.

They do not believe that these would have been significantly changed by the time of our proposed trip next year and therefore we have had to have some hard discussions about the future of the project.

It is therefore with sadness that we must report that we had to make the decision to cancel our plans to travel to Botswana in 2023. Without the ability to hold the camp and to deliver the education symposium we do not feel that we would be able to deliver the benefits of the project to all participants and partners that we would be able to if both events were able to go ahead. 

We will maintain close communication with our colleagues in Botswana and it is everyone’s desire that we will look at how we can develop this partnership further once they are further down their journey with moving out of Covid restrictions.

We do however have good news – we have managed to secure a new partnership for our global health partnership work for children and young people with diabetes. This partnership will be with our paediatric diabetes colleagues at Tygerburghospital in Cape Town in South Africa.

Our team of 12 young people with type 1 diabetes and our 16 diabetes health care professionals will travel to Cape Town in March 2023 and will work with our colleagues and fellow young people with type 1 diabetes from Tygerburg Hospital to help them to set up their first ever young people’s diabetes camps. This is a very exciting opportunity and will enable us to share the knowledge and experience that we have gained from having delivered diabetes camps in the East of England for 10 years. 

We will also have the opportunity to work with our diabetes health care professional colleagues at Tygerburg Hospital to co-deliver a 3 day education symposium on the management of type 1 diabetes in children and young people.

We are absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to work with the team from Tygerburg and are looking forward with enthusiasm to being able to share the real benefits that children and young people with diabetes can get from attending diabetes adventure and education camps.

We very much hope that you will be happy that your donation will support us in this new partnership and look forward to sharing updates on this exciting partnership opportunity with you on this page.