Dar es Salaam - In a bid to strengthen capacity for crisis preparedness and response in the African continent, the World Health Organization is collaborating with Member States to strengthen the response infrastructure.

Tanzania, which is among 17 countries in the initial phase of implementing the new initiative is training a total of 150 health professionals, spread across various sectors and disciplines, to qualify them into the roster of African Health Volunteers Corps (AVoHC) SURGE emergency responders with desired qualities ready to deploy to detect and respond to emergencies.

WHO and Africa CDC have recently joined forces to collectively develop the AVoHC-SURGE roter. AVoHC is a reference to Africa CDC’s initiative “Africa CDC’s African Volunteer Health Corps initiative.” SURGE is a reference to WHO’s initiative, “Strengthening & Utilizing Response Groups for Emergencies.”

During the official opening of the training, Prof. Paschal Rugajo, on behalf of the Chief Medical Officer, thanked WHO and CDC Africa for including Tanzania in the first batch of AVoHC SURGE roster.

“This opportunity for AVoHC-SURGE Team training in our country has come at the right time as there is need of utilizing SURGE staff during emergencies and available ones lack the required capacity. The training will ensure Tanzania is equipped to mobilize and respond to public health emergencies within the first 24 to 48 hours of confirmation,” said Prof. Rugajo.

 “Upon completion of the training, participants will officially join a continental roster of emergency experts to emergencies in their own countries, at the direction of their government and with support as needed from WHO and Africa CDC. They may also be called upon to deploy to neighboring countries.,” said Dr. Christine Musanhu, speaking on behalf of the WHO Country Representative in Tanzania.

With the increase of severity and frequency of health emergencies across Africa, the WHO has initiated reforms to the current emergency response architecture. The initiative translated lessons learnt from the pandemic into African driven solutions that reflect regional, national and local needs. The reform constitutes three components (also called flagships) to improve capacity of all Member States to Prepare (PROSE), Detect (TASS) and Response (SURGE) to public health emergencies.

Africa experiences up to 100 health emergencies annually, ranging from disease outbreaks to natural or human-made disasters. In the process of responding to these emergencies lessons have been learnt and progress has been made. In the past three years Tanzania has prepared and/or responded to Ebola, COVID-19, Cholera, Dengue, Leptospirosis and Anthrax.

The most recent strategic risk assessment conducted in September 2022, showed that the country is at high to very high risk for infectious diseases outbreaks such as the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic, cholera and pandemic influenza and natural disasters. Preparing for and addressing these hazards effectively is vital to protecting people’s health and building resilient health systems.

Prior to this training WHO worked with the government and partners in Tanzania to develop and validated the roadmap for implementing the Flagship initiative after the introduction of the Flagship initiative through a joint AFRO and WCO scoping mission.

During the mission, WHO handed over 8 vehicles to the Ministry of Health to facilitate in-country teams of highly skilled, resourced, and well-coordinated professionals arrive at a location of disasters or disease outbreaks within the shortest time possible (within 72 hours) and coordinate a rapid response to minimize their impact.

Although significant progress has been made in responding to health emergencies, with the average response time decreased from 131 days in 2017 to 45 in 2019, protracted and emerging conflicts are driving humanitarian crises in 13 countries in the African region, with Sahel countries being the worst affected. This is in addition to the threats posed by emerging and re-emerging epidemic prone diseases.

The flagship projects will build upon existing infrastructure to put in place a well-organized partner support system that augments national capacity when needed, incorporating lessons learned from COVID-19, Ebola and other health emergencies.