END in Africa News

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

Africa’s First Generation Free from Lymphatic Filariasis: Togo’s Triumph over an Infectious Disease

July 30th, 2016

Togo’s lymphatic filiariasis (LF) story began in 1997, when the World Health Assembly (WHA) passed a resolution calling for the “elimination of lymphatic filariasis as a public health problem.”[1] Although the idea of eliminating neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) such as LF was, at the time, unprecedented in Africa, and funding for such an endeavor was

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

END in Africa Project Launches in Côte d’Ivoire: USAID Hosts Opening Ceremony at US Embassy

December 17th, 2015

USAID marked the official launch of its END in Africa project in Côte d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast), with a ceremony at the US Embassy in Abidjan on Monday, December 7, 2015, presided by Andrew Haviland, US Chargé d’Affaires and Dr Conombo Diabaté, Côte d’Ivoire’s Deputy Director General for Health. The END in Africa project works

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

Helen Keller International and TOMS: Motivating Community Drug Distributors in Sierra Leone

August 20th, 2015

“My old shoes are worn out and I was thinking if my parents can afford to buy me another pair of shoes before the opening of school.” – Fatmata, age 8. Efforts to fight Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) are truly massive undertakings, since their success hinges upon the ability of national NTD programs to literally

Using TIPAC Data to Drive Resource Mobilization

July 30th, 2015

Getting people excited about the prospect of learning how to sift through and analyze complex data can be a tough sell. However, they tend to become more interested in getting trained once they begin to understand how data analytics and visualization can help them solve difficult problems. In Togo, such training has helped the national

Down But Not Out: Sierra Leone’s NTD Program Restarts Activities as the Ebola Threat Subsides

June 30th, 2015

It all started a year and a half ago in Guinea, West Africa, when in December 2013, the country reported several cases of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). By March 2014, the outbreak had spread to neighboring Liberia. In May, it reached also Sierra Leone, dealing a huge blow the country’s public health system, including