Date: 2017-10-30 17:30:26 ID: 1748
The Minister of Health of Burkina Faso, on 30 October 2017, officially launched the RIPOST project (project for Public Health Capacity Building in Francophone West African Countries).
The ceremony took place in the presence of the special representative of the President of the ECOWAS Commission, the Director General of WAHO accompanied by Directors and staff of the institution, members of the AMP team and the French Development Agency as well as delegates of beneficiary countries.
With an endowment amounting to 4.7 million euros, fully funded by France and covering the period 2017-2021, the RIPOST project mainly aims at strengthening national health systems by improving the public health capacity of some francophone ECOWAS countries. These, for now, are Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Niger and Togo. More particularly, it involves building the capacity of national public health institutions of member States in the area of coordination and management of epidemics, building WAHO’s capacity in the area of health watch and public health and finally supporting the development of a network of NCIs of African States and technical partners under the auspices of WAHO.
Three components are at the centre of this project, namely: the training of public health professionals in field epidemiology, strengthening of social and community mobilisation for the prevention and control of epidemics and the enhancement of WAHO’s technical expertise, and supporting the networking of Countries and Technical Partners.
As explained by the Director General of WAHO, Dr Xavier CRESPIN, the RIPOST project initiative dates back to the observation made about the fragility of national and regional health systems during epidemics in general and particularly the Ebola virus disease epidemic, which shook West Africa in 2014 and 2015.
Beyond this observation, it has been ascertained that the West Africa region is highly affected by the emergence of infectious diseases, among which is the burden of diseases from animal origin, in particular. Finally, there are also natural catastrophes, which produce health problems with a negative impact on socio-economic development.
All this explains the need to adopt, on the one hand, a more harmonised approach to disease surveillance, the management of warning and response to epidemics, and on the other hand, a more harmonised approach to public health, broadly speaking, in West African countries.
For the RIPOST Officer at the French Development Agency, Dr Patrick Dauby, the RIPOST project is a response to several issues, including socio-economic development, social wellbeing, reducing social imbalances, gender equality and finally adaptation to climate change. That is why he exhorted each stakeholder to take ownership of the project and make it a model, pending its extension to other countries.
That also is the opinion of the Minister, Nicolas MEDA, who expressed the wish that all country representatives and partners would assimilate all the essential information relating to the implementation of the project.
Immediately after the official launch ceremony, deliberations of the project Steering Committee meeting opened to accelerate the project implementation. For a period of 72 hours, the committee would do an overview of the progress of the project by AMP and members of the Group, provide information to beneficiary countries on the project and its implementation mechanisms, present the 2017 annual Action Plan and formulate measures to be taken to accelerated the project implementation.
For 72 hours, WAHO, in collaboration with the partners, AFD and AMP, as well as country participants, would examine all the necessary arrangements for the continuation of the RIPOST project, in view of the expected benefits for ECOWAS countries.
