Good news stories can be sometimes hard to come by. All too often the television tells us only of humanity at its worst: crimes, killings, and politicians doing dodgy things. Away from the screens, however, incredible victories take place every day – and often in the most surprising places. Rwanda, for example, is known as one of the poorest and most deprived nations in the world; but has recently seen an incredible and inspiring health revolution. You probably missed the news but what has happened in that small African nation can teach us about life in Wiltshire.

Back in the year 2000, over 150 world leaders got together in the United Nations’ Headquarters, New York, to create the Millennium Development Goals – a set of targets devised to improve global health and wellbeing. Lots of them were considered pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking – such as the aims of ‘halving world hunger’ or for ‘all children to be in primary education’ by 2015. Rwanda, however, took the goals very seriously; and in the space of 15 years, death rates from HIV, malaria and TB have tumbled 80 per cent, women dying in childbirth has dropped by two thirds and overall life expectancy has soared by nearly twenty years. One in four children used to be dead before their fifth birthday but it is now a tiny fraction of that – 590,000 Rwandan children’s lives have been saved since New York.

The secret to Rwanda’s super-charged health care system has been to get the local community involved. In need of a cheap solution, the cash-strapped Rwandan Ministry of Health couldn’t fly in doctors and so appointed an army of volunteer community health workers. One person for every hamlet – about 45,000 in total – was elected by townsfolk to take on an unsalaried job of doing health checks. Given a mobile phone and a crash course in basic healthcare skills (like how to check for a fever and spot signs of serious illness in mums and babies), these health workers were paid for each person they visit. It sounds ludicrously simple, but instead of doling out medicines, perhaps their most important life-saving task was to tell someone when they look unwell and walk with them to a health centre.

We do not live in sub-Saharan Africa but, like people the world over, we can be terrible at realising when we need help. Most of us live within 15 minutes of a GP surgery, yet thousands of us get needlessly sick every year – simply because we are too scared, embarrassed or oblivious of our symptoms. It is this reluctance (or prudishness) that contributes to us having some of the poorest cancer survival rates in all of Europe. Of course, it needn’t be this way. Rwanda is coming from a place of extreme poverty but gives us an incredible example of what can be achieved by regular folk working together. The good news for us is that taking the time to look out for our neighbours, colleagues and those we live with could very well do more good than we could possibly imagine.