eHealth Africa planted 500 trees for Earth Day

Last week, just in time for Earth Day 2022, our team in Kano and Abuja embarked on a “plant a tree” campaign. We believe that one of the most significant ways we can help to address the concerns of climate change is to plant trees. As an organization, while we strive to be more energy-efficient to reduce our carbon footprint, we also take other actions to improve the communities we work and live in. For this campaign, we took to some selected communities in Kano and Abuja to plant 500 trees, 300 in Kano, and 200 in Abuja.

About the “plant a tree” campaign, Dr. Kabir İbrahim Getso, Kano State Commissioner for Environment, had this to say, “The essence of Earth Day is to awaken our consciousness to create awareness to protect our environment and engage in practices that will ensure sustainable management of our environment. The very high temperatures we are experiencing and the flooding in Nigeria and around the world are some effects of climate change. Organizations and individuals need to join hands with the government to safeguard the environment and I would like to appreciate eHealth Africa for joining hands with the Kano State Ministry of this environment to carry out this tree planting exercise.”

Here are pictures from the plant a tree campaign in Kano and Abuja

Harnessing Innovation to reduce malaria

By Faridah Tajuddeen

According to the World Health Organization, there were an estimated 241 million cases of malaria worldwide, with an estimated 627,000 deaths in 2020, and 80% of these deaths were children under five years from Sub-Saharan Africa.

The populations with the highest malaria mortality tend to reside in hard-to-reach regions of Africa, with limited access to health facilities. Is there something that needs to be in place to reduce the number of malaria deaths? How do we as an organization use innovation and data to reduce the malaria burden and save lives?

Here are three ways we have harnessed innovation to reduce the malaria burden.

Adequate tracking saves lives

In October 2021, the World Health Organization engaged eHealth Africa to support the Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC) Cycle 4 campaign with GIS eTracking across all the 21 Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Adamawa State, and 4 selected LGAs of Yobe State. The campaign was house to house, and we employed the services of Community Drug Distributors (CDD) for drug delivery.

eHA provided technical, equipment, and human resources to support the cycle 4 campaign by collecting and analyzing the passive tracks of the Community Drug Distributor (CDD) teams during SMC Cycle 4 campaign using Vaccinator Tracking System (VTS). We provided VTS for coverage, and this helped with the numbers of houses reached, as the tracker shows any missing location for mop-up. We also tracked the drugs to ensure effective utilization.

Identifying coverage gaps with GIS

We supported the Malaria Consortium in mapping out nine hard-to-reach local government areas in Kaduna and eleven hard-to-reach local government areas in Kano to make them eligible for ICCM (Integrated Community Case Management). ICCM is a strategy that focuses on training, supporting, and supplying community health workers (CHWs) to provide diagnosis and treatments for illnesses such as malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea for children of families with difficult access to health facilities. Research has shown that ICCM can potentially decrease the child mortality rate of these three illnesses by a whopping 60%.

We leveraged our expertise in geographic information systems to collect geospatial data relating to settlement names and locations, and the nearest functional primary and secondary health facilities to the settlements for two weeks.

Access to geospatial data can reduce the malaria burden

We are increasing access to geospatial data in public health planning by opening access to the data we have collected over the years to the public, to allow a wider cross-section of people and organizations access to data that can assist them in decision making and resource planning. We created a tool called the Data Portal, which is a collected catalog of a wide variety of geospatial data and other datasets in the countries and regions eHealth Africa has worked in. We developed this to serve the data access, routine analysis, and informed decision-making needs of government, private sectors, donors, partners, and individuals.

The data is accessible to all for non-commercial use.

With access to this data, the government, non-governmental organizations, relief, and charitable organizations have information on boundaries, settlements, and health facilities; this makes field operations and deployment of resources a lot easier. So when mosquito nets distribution or chemoprevention campaigns are planned, there’s enough data available to serve as a guide, providing information on different settlements and how many health facilities are accessible in those areas.

The fight against malaria is global and still ongoing, and thanks to better prevention and treatment tools, there has been a drop of 44% in the malaria mortality rate in the last two decades in Africa.

Addressing Gender Bias Around Adolescent Girls’ Contraceptive Use

By Sunday James, Fatimah Abdullahi, Hafsat Jafaar and Stephanie Okpere

Adolescent woman receiving counseling and contraceptive from an eHA-ANRiN service provider during routine Adolescent Health Service delivery in Kaduna

Around the world, Gender and other Social norms have had a tremendous impact on the Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) of young people, especially Adolescent Girls. Cultural constructs of gender shape expectations related to sexuality and play an essential part in defining what roles and behaviors are considered appropriate for Adolescent Girls and Boys.

Normative expectations embedded in many societies about gender and sexuality create a double standard – which may manifest differently in various settings – that typically encourages sexual liberty for men and demands sexual constraint from women. This values purity and virginity above all else for girls while giving adolescent boys more freedom, including the room to explore, experiment, and engage in sexual relationships. This double standard also places the majority of the burden on females to reject sexual advances from males and to take precautions to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), with females often blamed for STIs and unintended pregnancies. This contributes to the idea that reproductive health is a female responsibility with no role for men. Existing social norms that place men at an advantage with increased access to opportunities also affect young women. Due to these norms, men are more likely to control resources and make decisions for their partners, and may not allow their partners to use contraception. These norms also limit the educational opportunities for young women, marginalizing them from obtaining access to accurate information on sexual and reproductive health.

To make SRH services more accessible to young people, especially adolescent girls and women, eHA ANRiN is addressing gender norms at the community level and building a supportive environment by addressing social and gender norms in addition to increasing individual knowledge that helps in reducing stigma. This effort aims at improving youth-friendly health services at the community level through a more holistic package of interventions that include comprehensive sex education, raising awareness about services to generate more demand among young people for sexual and reproductive health services, and building community support that will decrease stigma and encourage youth to engage in discussions about SRH and seek out services through advocacies, stakeholders engagement, awareness creation at key live events. In addition, eHA ANRiN is providing AHS services and a variety of contraceptive methods to Adolescent Married Women aged 15-19years old to bridge the existing unmet need for contraception. These actions are already having a greater cumulative impact on improving uptake of AHS services, thereby increasing the state’s modern Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (mCPR) and explicitly challenging discriminatory gender norms that put Married Adolescent Girls at a disadvantaged position through awareness creation and balanced counseling services. 

How a Global Health Facility Database can improve the timely delivery of health services

By Chinedu Anarado

The COVID-19 pandemic amplified gaps in global capacity to respond to public health events of such dimension and scale. The world was slow to respond, and when it did, wealth inequalities ensured that some countries had access to life-saving support before others. Poorer countries largely bore the burden of COVID-19 as they grappled with huge infrastructure gaps while trying to ensure their people were safe from COVID-19. At the same time, global health strategists did not have access to the information they needed to deploy appropriate interventions to support developing countries. 

Bamali Nuhu Hospital, Kano Municipal, Kano, Nigeria

The impact of this scenario was predictable. Vulnerable populations were more affected, while those living far from health facilities required more effort to get vaccinated. In Africa, the average readiness rate for vaccine rollout was 40 percent. These issues highlighted the pressing need for improved data that can provide relevant insights into the location of health infrastructures and the distribution of healthcare services. The world needed definitive answers to a straightforward question: where are the health facilities?

Quality data about the location and status of health infrastructures at the local, national and international levels could have improved global efforts to contain COVID-19. With reliable information on health facilities, Governments can improve their vaccine logistics, distribute personal protective equipment (PPE), and expedite vaccine and therapeutics rollout. It became evident that if we want to rapidly reach the needed populations with the necessary support, we must understand their accessibility to health facilities. 

In December of 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a global campaign to improve access and visibility of health facilities among member states. This global initiative is being implemented across WHO regional offices in Africa (AFRO), South East Asia (SEARO), Eastern Mediterranean (EMRO), and the Western Pacific (WPRO) regions. The goal is to help countries collate and validate their health facility master list and contribute this information to a global database of health facilities. 

“In this age of information, member states need updated database tools to reach the World Health Organization’s triple billion targets for healthier populations, universal health coverage (UHC), and health emergencies protection.”

— Steve Macfeely, Director, Data and Analytics ,World Health Organization

Republic of Tanzania’s Health Facility Registry

We can achieve these challenging targets with robust and authoritative data collection, integrated into a collaborative system that allows citizens and municipalities to identify the locations and services provided by health facilities in their vicinity.

This Global Health Facilities Database (GHFD) will serve as a central repository, providing information such as the health facility’s name, location, and type while assigning a unique identifier to each. In addition to improving aspects of primary care, this data can improve response time, identify gaps in quality, and support advanced health emergency efforts, such as the COVID-19 response.

The public health space has relied on platforms from multilateral agencies and nonprofits to plan interventions. Platforms such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, the WHO ISS, and e-SURV database, GRID3, and the Global Health sites mapping project were some of the only sources of information on health facility data. But these data sources can be inadequate and often do not reflect the realities on the ground. Hence, the WHO has conceived the Global Health Facility Database (GHFD) project as a public good to enhance information access on the location and status of health facilities across all WHO member countries. 

The GHFD project will require participating countries to update their health facility data, participate in an assessment of the existing health facility list or registry, sign an MoU with WHO to share that information with a global database managed by the WHO GIS office, and receive capacity support to ensure the information is updated periodically. A standard health facility list should bear information on the status, location, and capacity. 

Each facility in each country will come with a unique identifier on the GFHD database. Thirty-two countries in Africa are participating in the project’s first phase, which will run for five years. eHealth Africa is implementing this project in five countries: Cameroon, Chad, the Gambia, Seychelles, and Togo. For eHA, this is one of the ways we support the strengthening of health systems and ensure that we can improve access to care for vulnerable populations.

“Supporting WHO member states with establishing and maintaining a master list of health facilities and combining them into a standardized health facility registry will not only strengthen national healthcare delivery systems but also provide a critical resource needed to respond to any public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).”

— Vince Seaman, Senior Program Manager, Polio, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

We believe that the time has come to support establishing and maintaining a master list of health facilities in each WHO member state and the creation of a global health facility database (GHFD). The availability, quality, and accessibility of the master list of health facilities and the Global health facilities database will transform our capacity to deliver interventions and ensure that wastage of health consumables such as vaccines reduces and health support is prompt and timely.