The World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa (WHO AFRO), in accordance with recommendations from various WHO committees, has developed three flagship programmes to support Member States in the African region to prepare for, detect and respond to public health emergencies. They are the re...sult of extensive consultations with more than 30 African government ministers, technical actors, partners across the continent as well as regional institutions such as the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), whose contributions have shaped the priority activities. This report provides the second quarterly summary of progress in implementing the flagship programmes.
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WHO Progress Brief
Progress Brief
July 2017
Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), including mental disorders, currently pose one of the biggest threats to health and development globally, particularly in low and middle income countries2. It is predicted that unless proven interventions are rapidly implemented in countries, in the short to medium ...term, health care costs will increase exponentially and severe negative consequences will ensue not only to individuals and families but to whole societies and economies. NCDs are already a major burden in South Africa, but without added rigorous and timely action the health and development consequences may well become catastrophic. Immediate and additional, high quality, evidence based and focussed interventions are needed to promote health, prevent disease and provide more effective and equitable care and treatment for people living with NCDs at all levels of the health system. The problem is further compounded by the rising global prevalence of multi-morbidity (defined as the coexistence of two or more chronic diseases in one individual).
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Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a category of chronic, disabling, and at times disfiguring diseases and conditions that occur most commonly in the setting of extreme poverty. Historically, NTDs have received less attention and funding when compared to other diseases occurring in the same regi...ons of the world. Several NTDs have internationally agreed upon targets for their control, elimination, and eradication. Nineteen countries in the WHO African Region have successfully eliminated at least one NTD, however recent gap analyses identified moderate to severe gaps across technical, strategy and service delivery, and enabling factors. This report summarizes the findings of a scoping review of published literature undertaken to highlight control, elimination, and eradication efforts towards NTDs across the WHO African Region over the last 30 years.
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While there has been real progress in addressing the burden of disease in the WHO African region, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the link between health, economics and security, as the region saw decades of progress threatened, including positive trends in decreasing inequality. In the Africa...n Region the momentum towards achieving the 2030 SDG disease burden reduction targets (SDG targets 3.3, 3.4 and 3B) has stalled.
The COVID-19 pandemic was also a major threat to gains made, such as the eradication of polio in the region, declared in 2020; reduced numbers of new HIV infections in 2021 compared to 2010; and passing the 2020 milestone of the End TB Strategy, with a 22% reduction in new cases compared with 2015. However, the pandemic also disrupted essential health services in 92% of countries globally, 22.7 million children missed basic immunization, there was an increase in malaria and TB, and global deaths from TB rose for the first time since 2015.
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The leishmaniases are a group of diseases caused by Leishmania spp., which occur in cutaneous, mucocutaneous and visceral forms. They are neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), which disproportionately affect marginalized populations who have limited access to health care. HIV co-infected patients with... Leishmania infection are highly infectious to sandflies, and an increase in the coinfection rate in an endemic area is likely to increase the effective infective reservoir.
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The Greater Horn of Africa is experiencing one of the worst food insecurity situations in decades. It is estimated
that more than 37 million people are in Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)1 phase 3 or above and approximately 7 million children under the age of five are acutely mal...nourished in the region. While finding food and safe water is the absolute priority, the health response is essential to avert preventable disease and death.
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The Transformation Agenda (TA) ushered in an ambitious reform process intended to transform the World Health Organization (WHO) into an organization that is proactive, results-driven, accountable and which meets stakeholder expectations, towards transforming and improving public health services in t...he African Region. It aimed to achieve a WHO that is pro-results, which optimally and creatively targets technical work as well as make operations more responsive, with greater effectiveness in both communications and partnerships. The Africa Region has been the epicentre of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic and it’s one of the leading causes of disease and death on the continent. The WHO, with partners, has worked tirelessly for many years to control the threat and reduce the negative impact of the disease. Since the early 2000s, significant progress has been made in the global fight against the scourge of HIV. However, the WCA subregion was falling concerningly behind ESA on several key indicators of progress. In 2016, the WHO joined UNAIDS, UNICEF and other partners in a call for a strong and urgent response to support WCA countries to develop catch-up plans to triple and fast-track ART coverage, to enable the region to catch up with ESA by the end of 2020. Implementation of a widespread test-and-treat strategy, coupled with the scale-up of differentiated service delivery (DSD) and mobilization of requisite funding, accelerated WCA’s progress towards this goal. The HIV treatment catch-up and fast-track plan has achieved its target of seeing the West and Central African region (WCA) catch up with the Eastern and Southern African region’s (ESA) antiretroviral coverage rate of 78% in 2021, albeit later than the 2020 target time frame. A 33% improvement was achieved in WCA, against 21% in ESA, between 2015–2020. WCA achieved a significant 42% increase, compared to ESA’s 23%, between 2015 and 2021, to see WCA draw level with ESA at 78%. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) alone, progress of up to 47% was observed between 2015 and 2020, for example. In addition, 1.6 million more People Living with HIV (PLHIV) were enrolled on antiretroviral treatment (ART) between 2015 and 2020.
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A quick reference guide for health authorities and health-care workers
Revised 2015
This toolkit for integrated vector management (IVM) is designed to help national and regional programme managers coordinate across sectors to design and run large IVM programmes.
The toolkit provides the technical detail required to plan, implement, monitor and evaluate an IVM approach. IVM can... be used when the aim is to control or eliminate vector-borne diseases and can also contribute to insecticide resistance management. This toolkit provides information on where vector-borne diseases are endemic and what interventions should be used, presenting case studies on IVM as well as relevant guidance documents for reference.
The diseases that are the focus of this toolkit are malaria, lymphatic filariasis, dengue, leishmaniasis, onchocerciasis, human African trypanosomiasis and schistosomiasis. It also includes information on other viral diseases (Rift Valley fever, West Nile fever, Chikungunya, yellow fever) and trachoma. If other vector-borne diseases appear in a country or area, vector control with an IVM approach should be adopted, as per national priorities.
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n 2015, Member States of the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its accompanying Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with the third goal of the agenda focusing on health – good health and well-being. This has the attainment of universal health coverage (UHC) a...s its umbrella target. Since then, the WHO Regional Office for Africa has been supporting countries plan, and monitor progress towards this goal. This report represents an analysis of the evidence so far countries are making towards this goal, and includes the effect COVID-19 has had on its attainment so far. It also makes recommendations on how countries can prioritize their health actions post COVID-19, in a manner that allows acceleration of progress towards UHC.
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WHO Guideline. Since 2010, countries in the meningitis belt have started to introduce a new serogroup A meningococcal conjugate vaccine conferring individual protection and herd immunity. Following the successful roll-out of this vaccine, epidemics due to Neisseria meningitidis serogroup A (NmA) are... disappearing, but other serogroups (e.g. NmW, NmX and NmC) still cause epidemics, albeit at a lower frequency and of a smaller size. Due to these changes, WHO organized the review of the evidence to provide recommendations for epidemic control, related to operational thresholds for investigation and response to outbreaks, the use of rapid diagnostic tests, antibiotic regimens in epidemics, and prophylaxis for household contacts of cases
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The African Region has been experiencing unprecedented health challenges due to the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which have compounded the already difficult task the Region was facing in moving towards universal health coverage (UHC) attainment.