Ghana News

Neglected Tropical Diseases Program Sustainability: Innovative Mechanisms for Private Sector Engagement

May 31st, 2018

In the last 10 years, donors including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have provided significant funding to combat neglected tropical diseases (NTD) in West Africa, resulting in a realistic goal of control and elimination by 2020. In an era of shrinking budgets for NTD surveillance and

Cross-Border Collaboration: Key for Sustaining Gains Against NTDs

January 31st, 2018

The excitement that surrounded the World Health Organization (WHO) announcement in 2017 that the Republic of Togo had become the first sub-Saharan African country to eliminate lymphatic filariasis (LF or elephantiasis) as a public health problem is slowly dying out as we contemplate the implications of this announcement. Ghana has also submitted its final dossier

Cross-Border Collaboration: Synchronizing Treatment for NTDs in West Africa

February 28th, 2017

After six years, during which over 429 million treatments were administered to over 202 million people, many of the six END in Africa-supported countries are ‘walking the final mile’ in the fight against several neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)—namely elephantiasis and trachoma—with plans to stop nationwide mass drug administration (MDA) for these two diseases by 2020.

Preparing for Post-Elimination while Avoiding Further Neglect

February 1st, 2017

Neglected tropical disease programs (NTDPs) have made significant achievements in the last decade. With the financial support of international donors, many affected countries that previously had disease cases nationwide, have transitioned to just experiencing disease “hot spots,” in which certain NTDs are largely confined to specific geographic areas within the country. A few countries have

Enabling sustainability through advocacy: Key principles to better articulate program value and advance program objectives

September 28th, 2016

Neglected Tropical Disease Programs (NTDPs) have long known that advocacy can be a powerful tool for engaging stakeholders and catalyzing action. Over the past decade, many national NTDPs have used advocacy campaigns to encourage citizens to take preventive medicines for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) such as trachoma and lymphatic filariasis. Yet all too often campaigns

Sustainability Framework Offers Possible Roadmap to Lasting Impact on NTDs

July 26th, 2016

Neglected Tropical Disease Programs (NTDPs) across West Africa have achieved tremendous success in efforts to control and eliminate highly debilitating, but not typically well-known, diseases. Recently, the country of Togo achieved one of the most significant accomplishments to date when it was declared free of lymphatic filariasis (LF) by the World Health Organization (WHO) in

The Beginning of the End: Ghana’s Trachoma Elimination Program

July 19th, 2016

One of the oldest diseases known to man, trachoma is a painful infectious eye disease caused by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis.  It begins as conjunctivitis, usually in childhood, and infection is often recurrent in children living in extreme poverty. Spread through bacteria-carrying houseflies or contact with infected persons, trachoma is the world’s leading cause of preventable

Strategic Social Partnerships Take Hold at the Ghana Health Service and NTD Program

November 30th, 2015

Partnerships are hardly unusual in the public health arena. More often than not they spring up organically, are limited in scope, and focus on achieving a specific, predefined goal. Once the initial goal has been achieved, these partnerships tend to simply disintegrate. Yet what if the organizations involved, rather than relying on happenstance, took the

Good news on NTDs

October 7th, 2015

END in Africa congratulates scientists on winning the 2015 Nobel Prize in medicine for advances in NTD and malaria drugs. The project also salutes Mexico for becoming the third country to have eliminated river blindness, joining Colombia the Ecuador. On Monday, October 5, 2015, the Nobel Committee of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced that three

Benchmarking Organizational Capabilities: Where to Begin?

June 30th, 2015

NTD Program Management and Sustainable Impact   Experience has shown that developing a Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) finance strategy that’s aligned with the country’s NTD Master Plan strengthens the latter and has a sustained, measurable impact. But effective finance strategies don’t happen overnight! Devising one requires a solid understanding of organizational capabilities as they related