The World Health Organization (WHO), has said although the solitary experience of COVID-19 is painfully expensive, the next pandemic will find African better prepared.
Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, Africa Regional Director, World Health Organization (WHO AFRO), raised this hope at a three-day, high-level summit on “Ports to Arms” Africa responds to the COVID-19, equity, delivery, and manufacturing, on Wednesday in Abuja.
She said “With available data in the region’s planning, and partnerships that have been established with the components of being more self-sufficient in producing some of the key tools, Africa will be better prepared for the next pandemic.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports that the summit is a follow up on the October 2021 World Health Summit in Berlin, which called on world leaders to address global pandemic preparedness, the high-level dialogues at the 2021 Wilton Park events and building on the G20 Rome declaration and the Global COVID 19 Summit: Ending the Pandemic and Building Back Better.
The summit further seeks to: “Engender a platform for African and global experts to share effective approaches to addressing equitable access to COVID-19 tools;
“Enable stakeholders to redefine the state of ‘global solidarity’ to advance collective pandemic response;
Develop practical steps to actualise commitments – going beyond rhetoric, and urgently address access to COVID-19 tools, with a focus on equitable vaccine access and manufacturing for the African Continent;
“Design strategies to close the delivery gap of essential health services such as routine immunisation and interventions that build on Africa’s medium- and long-term recovery and resilience strategies.
“Access to vaccines is key to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. While the world contends with inequitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, at a sub-national level, the challenges of procuring, delivering and getting vaccines into arms of everyone in all our communities has its own set of challenges, depending on different resource settings and health systems infrastructure,” she outlined.
Moeti said that African countries have spent the last two years assessing their capacities and gaps to be better prepared for the next pandemic.
She stated that as related to dealing with pandemics, the WHO’s Joint External Evaluation (JEE), help countries assess their health security strengths and weaknesses to direct resources toward the most urgent needs, protecting the country and the rest of the world from infectious diseases.
JEEs are voluntary, external assessments of a country’s ability to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious diseases and other public health threats.
“The JEE process brings together experts from around the world to work with a country to assess its strengths and weaknesses and make recommendations to improve health security capacity.
“Following the JEE, countries are aware of their gaps in health security capacity and can take action to build these capabilities,” she explained.
She added that the WHO has got teams of partners and experts from outside and they looked at every single country in the WHO African region and they know very well what sort of capacities they have, what gaps they have, and have also started to work with them.
Moeti stated that those gaps vary in terms of their human capacity or technical expertise, or diagnostic capacities.
“The pandemic has passed, tried some of the capacity building we’ve had to respond in many ways to COVID-19 and different components of the resilient health system, we still have a very long way to go,” she stressed.
She said “in my view, the experience of this pandemic has focused not only on political decision makers at the top level to be aware of the importance of investing in preparedness in resilient health systems, but also on foster partnerships.
“And we’re working together with many agencies to look at different components of being ready to detect epidemic where it’s starting to respond to in containment and mobilize a capacity to transition that make sure that you’re providing other health services at the same time as responding to something like COVID-19. (NAN)
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