Date: 2018-01-25 17:03:43 ID: 1795
Ouagadougou, 22 January 2018 – The Deputy Director General of the West Africa Health Organization, (WAHO), Dr. Laurent ASSOGBA, officially opened, in Ouagadougou, the regional workshop for the finalization of the guidelines for developing the national strategy for community-based interventions (CBI) in ECOWAS member States.
In his opening address, Dr. Assogba underscored the importance of community-based interventions, which largely contribute to the sustainable development of the health status of the population. « The sustainable improvement of the health status of the population, these days, requires an awareness of the need to give a new dimension to our community-based interventions. These interventions constitute a community development process within which the individual, the family and the social group initiate and develop activities for health improvement for their own protection beyond health care».
It is therefore with this understanding and vision that WAHO collaborated with the regional office of the World Health Organization (WHO), the inter-country support team of WHO for West Africa, the UNICEF regional office for West and Central Africa and the Community of Practice for Health Service Provision (CdP/PSS) to develop two regional documents: one being the regional Guidelines, which provides direction to member States to revisit their existing national strategies on Community-Based Interventions (CBI) in order to align them with the community development perspective, which empowers the stakeholders at all levels and for which the health sector provides technical and advisory support. The other is a framework for the operationalization of the12 Action Points from the Dakar regional conference on health districts – 25 years after the Harare Declaration.
This workshop brought together national directors responsible for community health, representing the three linguistic zones of ECOWAS to (1) align the contents of the two documents in the three ECOWAS languages (French, English and Portuguese) and (2) agree on the final format and modalities for disseminating the said documents.
The Deputy Director General called on the WHO to have the documents adopted at the continental level, while expressing his desire to see “these documents used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health programs” for the wellbeing of the african people. He thanked the technical and financial partners such as WHO, UNICEF, CdP/PSS and the World Bank, through the SWEDD project, for enabling WAHO to organize the workshop. He also thanked the Minister of Health of Burkina Faso for accepting to host the workshop.
Prior to the opening speech, the WHO/AFRO representative pointed out that WHO attached a lot of importance to the workshop. He extended the gratitude and congratulations of the WHO Regional Director to WAHO for taking the lead to propose such guidelines on community participation.
C/Com/OOAS/HHK/250118