Amref Health Africa, Inc.

Through support from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and our donors, Amref Health Africa is strengthening the national laboratory system of South Sudan to provide accurate and timely diagnoses and to be able to provide HIV prevention and treatment services to control the epidemic in South Sudan.

To do this, Amref Health Africa is strengthening the lab systems of South Sudan by training both new and existing lab workers to provide higher quality services that support HIV care and treatment. In collaboration with South Sudan’s Ministry of Health, we are reviewing and updating in-service training programs so lab workers can upgrade their skills on the job.

Through this program, we ensure that labs have the equipment and supplies needed to offer high quality testing services that support disease diagnosis, care and treatment. We also ensure that labs can provide Early Infant Diagnosis (EID) for newborns that may have had an infectious disease transmitted through their mothers, as well as provide a safe blood supply through the National Blood Transfusion Service. This program also aims to strengthen the Public Health Laboratory in the capital of Juba so that samples collected throughout the country can be collected, re-tested for quality assurance, and inventoried. This would strengthen the overall national lab network. In the past, samples were often sent to labs in Nairobi, Kenya.

Amref Health Africa is currently partnering with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to prevent disease outbreaks at the community level in Tanzania. The project is part of the CDC’s Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), a push to strengthen systems that closely monitor diseases in communities. Its aim is to improve disease data collection, analysis, and communication between communities and health facilities which makes it easier to treat and prevent outbreaks.

Amref partners with the CDC to help identify challenges that prevent communities from detecting potential disease threats in the Arusha, Kilimanjaro, Kagera, Kigoma, Katavi and Mbeya regions in Tanzania.

Through the project, we trained 669 Community Health Volunteers (CHVs) and 132 health workers Community Based Surveillance (CBS) system. This system exposes the presence of diseases early, improves warning systems so that people are more aware, and ensures the reliable communication of this information from communities to local health facilities all the way up to national-level hospitals.

CHVs are trained to make household visits in their community and identify early symptoms of diseases. At these household visits, CHVs are trained to provide health education on how to prevent disease as well as to identify any troubling symptoms. They are also trained to provide referrals to nearby clinics and health facilities for treatment, and to report the disease cases to trained health workers like nurses.

Health workers like nurses are trained to identify diseases, provide improved treatment to patients, and to record and report cases of diseases that will be collected at both local-level and national-level databases.

In partnership with Comic Relief, Amref Health Africa is providing immunization across fifteen districts in the Afar region of Ethiopia, prioritizing the Berhale, Elidear, Dubti and Teru districts where there is a high proportion of children and pregnant women who do not complete vaccinations.

Many of the people who live in Afar’s hard-to-reach districts are women, young children and infants who live too far from a health facility where they can receive routine immunizations. This makes them more susceptible to preventable diseases such as polio and measles. Several of the communities that are in these districts are pastoral, which means they migrate throughout the year with their livestock. This keeps them even farther from health facilities where they can access necessary health services like immunization.

Through this project, we provide immunizations for young children, infants and pregnant women at health facilities in these districts and through mobile immunization teams – teams of health workers, well-stocked with immunizations that meet the pastoral communities on their migration routes. Additionally, the project works to reach community, clan and religious leaders who wield influence in their communities, so that they can promote immunization and other child health services.

Amref Health Africa has successfully stopped the outbreak of diseases such as Ebola and cholera. To stop the spread of COVID-19 in Africa, Amref is working closely with African Ministries of Health, the African Centres of Disease Control, and the World Health Organization to train frontline health workers with training on COVID-19, scale up testing, and expand community awareness on preventing the spread of the disease. In Kenya for example, we are improving disease surveillance, early symptom detection and tracking the spread of the disease, which Amref already does in several African countries including Tanzania.