Practice to be ready: Post-Ebola Resilience Project at Ministerial Conference on Global Health Security Agenda

News

14 Oct 2016

From 12-14 October 2016 the Ministerial Conference on Global Health Security Agenda took place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. This year the title of the Global health Security Agenda was ‘Practice to be ready’.
During the official opening of the conference Professor Koram from Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in Ghana and Professor Richards fromNjala University in Sierra Leone presented experiences of the ‘Post-Ebola Resilience project’.
This project is funded by the Netherlands Embassy of Ghana and is a unique collaboration of KIT (Royal Tropical Institute), Wageningen University, Noguchi Institute Ghana and a number of partners from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Rwanda.
The outbreak of Ebola in West Africa gave a global alarm: viruses are oblivious to national borders; victims can be infected worldwide. The ‘Post-Ebola Resilience project’ aims at improving health and well-being of communities in Sierra Leone and Guinea through resilience and preparedness of Ebola and other emerging infectious diseases that originate at the interface between humans, animals and their various environments. This is done through active community engagement and increased communication for cross-border regions in Sierra Leone and Guinea, by strengthening the local laboratory services and by creating social accountability in financing health systems (Result Based Financing (RBF)).

A unique collaboration

Ankie van den Broek, senior advisor at KIT and project leader of the Post-Ebola Resilience project: “This project is a unique collaboration between various institutes to work on the One Health Initiative. It involves applying a coordinated, collaborative, multidisciplinary and cross-sectorial approach. The communities are central in our approach :they are not only the first tob e at risks to suffer from the diseases that originate at the animal-human-ecosystems interface but they have also a lot of knowledge to manage this risk. By strengthening community systems and by integrating their knowledge in prevention strategies we are stronger in developing the preparedness for emerging diseases Further we work with the expertise from African organisations : “African solutions for Africa” on anthropology, veterinary sciences, laboratory sciences, public health.”

The Global health Security Agenda

The Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), launched in February 2014, is a growing partnership of over 50 nations, international organizations and non-governmental stakeholders. Its main goal is to help countries build their capacity to contribute towards a world safe from infectious disease threats and to elevate global health security as a national and global priority.