Update from TDDA Côte d’Ivoire
Health security and system strengthening work in Côte d’Ivoire continues to make excellent progress. TDDA’s contributions in this quarter were focused on achieving a “responsible exit” when our programme ends at the end of November 2022.
April – June 2022 highlights:
UK Minister and Ambassador witness CSO in action
We were delighted UK Minister for Africa Vicky Ford and the UK Ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire attended a COVID-19 awareness-raising initiative led by one of TDDA’s CSO partners. Over one hundred people were vaccinated during the campaign (May 2022) and the health district decided to keep the vaccination facility in place for a whole week to further increase vaccine coverage in the neighbourhood. The British government also promised to offer 300,000 doses of Astra Zeneca vaccines to the government of Côte d'Ivoire following the visit.
Strengthening community vigilance
We helped improve community-based surveillance in five health districts by organizing supervision missions that provided support to workers at 86 first-contact health facilities. We helped maximize their service delivery in line with latest international surveillance standards (IDSR3), identifying performance gaps and proposing plans to mitigate them. Community-based surveillance helps to identify public health events that might otherwise go undetected and ensure they are reported quickly and accurately so that decision-makers can take targeted act to prevent a wider public health emergency.
Helping to prevent the spread of disease across borders
We assisted the government to increase capacity at five border entry points by deepening 23 officials’ understanding of International Health Regulations in relation to border health security. The training, which took place in Abidjan in June, focused on the detection, isolation and reporting of sick travellers, using standardized operating procedures defined by the West African Economic and Monetary Union. This promises to enhance cross-border collaboration in the future, which will help to prevent diseases spreading between populations.
National Action Plan for Health Security (NAPHS) implementation gathers pace
A NAPHS is a vital tool that equips countries so that they are better able to prevent, prepare for, and respond to, disease outbreaks. While establishing this plan is an important first step, implementation is key. TDDA helped the Ivorian government to improve its NAPHS quarterly performance review scores by 26%, providing technical and financial support for monitoring and evaluation workshops involving a range of sectors. To ensure this progress is sustained, we held discussions with potential technical and financial partners, including the World Health Organization, to identify ways to ensure there is continuity after TDDA’s exit.