Tag Archives: sightsavers

Going Beyond Cooperation: Why it’s Critical for NTD Control and Elimination in Nigeria

Africa, ,

 

Trachoma prevalence mapping in Katsina State by State Team of Examiner and Recorder on hand-held mobile device. Photo from RTI International.

Trachoma prevalence mapping in Katsina State by State Team of Examiner and Recorder on hand-held mobile device. Credit: RTI International.

The following guest blog post from Benjamin Nwobi, resident program advisor for RTI International and the ENVISION project in Nigeria, and Sunday Isiyaku, country director for Sightsavers in Nigeria and lead for the UNITED Project, details a new alliance aimed at strengthening Nigeria’s Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD) program and maximizing the impact of resources directed at NTD control and elimination.

If we are to succeed in reaching the World Health Organization (WHO) NTD control and elimination targets for 2020, we must focus on Nigeria – a country with one of the highest NTD burdens in the world. We therefore commend the government of Nigeria for making NTDs a priority and working with partners to implement the national integrated NTD control and elimination plans. Such efforts have contributed to the eradication of guinea worm and will surely contribute to efforts such as the Saving One Million Lives Initiative.

 

It has been one hundred years since Nigeria’s independence and while much has changed through substantial development and investments, Nigeria’s rating against the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health-Indicators still lags; maternal and child morbidity and mortality remain high and quality and affordable health services are either lacking or not readily accessible, especially for the 70 percent of Nigerians living on less than $2 a day.

It is not surprising then that Nigeria carries one of the highest burdens of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). These communicable diseases are inextricably linked with poverty and are prevalent in areas with poor sanitation, inadequate safe water supply and substandard housing conditions. In late March 2014, Nigeria and its partners celebrated the country receiving the WHO certification for officially eradicating Guinea worm disease. Nigeria had been the most endemic country in the world for guinea worm with over 800,000 cases documented. Scale-up efforts are now underway to achieve control and elimination of other high prevalence NTDs such as onchocerciasis, soil transmitted helminths (STH), schistosomiasis, trachoma and lymphatic filariasis (LF) by the year 2020.

An enormous task

An undertaking so ambitious requires unprecedented partnership and coordination. Nigeria is a federated country consisting of 36 states and 774 local government areas and each level of government plays a specific role in fighting NTDs. Implementing a national NTD programme that can effectively wipe out these diseases is an enormous task.

An estimated 31 million people are currently at risk for onchocerciasis across 32 states of the country. Though prevalence mapping is still underway, Nigeria is ranked third highest in the world for LF, with 63 million persons at risk, and is estimated to have one of the highest STH burdens in Africa. Trachoma is the second major cause of avoidable blindness in the northern part of Nigeria. Ongoing mapping efforts will provide more information on exactly which areas require treatment.

As Dr. Bridget Okoeguale, Director of Public Health at Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health so aptly expressed, “We must work as a team or we cannot go anywhere.”

Promoting standardization

This is why USAID’s ENVISION Project implemented by RTI International and the Carter Center, and DfID’s UNITED project, led by Sightsavers, are establishing a new working order to donor-driven support for the national NTD programme in Nigeria – an alliance, aimed at exploiting synergies, eliminating duplication of efforts and maximizing impact of resources directed at NTD control and elimination.

With ENVISION working primarily in central and southern Nigeria and UNITED in northern Nigeria, the alliance helps the national program to maintain consistency and promote standardization of approaches across the various states, supporting not only the integrity of programming but also management functions such as drug logistics and data reporting, playing off the respective strengths of the partner organisations.

Children in Nasarawa State, Nigeria gather to learn how samples will be collected in their school. Photo by RTI International.

Children in Nasarawa State, Nigeria gather to learn how samples will be collected in their school. Credit: RTI International

Maximizing reach and impact

Teams from ENVISION and UNITED support many of the same core programme areas in the states where they work; activities like mass drug administration and community education and sensitization. But each project also brings additional areas of support, not necessarily provided by the other project. Forming this alliance has allowed more geographic reach for this expertise than could be achieved otherwise.

RTI International has introduced a new planning tool, the NTD Tool for Integrated Planning and Costing (TIPAC) across the country, and this is now being used nationwide to improve planning and costing. RTI has also worked with the WHO to develop an integrated NTD database platform that will allow the country to store, manage, analyze and report NTD data more effectively across all states.

Sightsavers has been focusing on improving supply chain management for commodities such as drugs in its project states. The national-level component of this project supports clearing of all NTD drugs to the national Drug Storage. Again, in this case, all other states benefit from strengthened supply chain capacity and are therefore able to maximize output. They have also developed behaviour change tools and strategies that will be applied across Nigeria.

The synergies that have resulted from this close alliance bring unique benefits to Nigeria’s national NTD programme and its ability to advance towards its elimination timeline, especially when coupled with the comparative advantages for implementation achieved through the coalition of organisations working across the nation.

As we enter another century in Nigeria’s history as a country, we are hopeful that this alliance will continue to be one of the critical pillars in supporting the Nigerian Government in reducing the NTD burden. Together we will see how, when a country is committed and aid organisations and international governments synchronize and combine their efforts, ambitious goals can be achieved and the lives of Nigerians improved forever.  

SAFEly Combatting Trachoma across Africa

Africa, Trachoma,

 

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By Anna Massey, Head of Strategic Government Partnerships at Sightsavers

When it comes to tackling the largest infectious cause of blindness in the world – trachoma – it is widely agreed that the SAFE strategy is key in moving towards elimination. Recommended by the World Health organization (WHO), the strategy aims to reduce the burden of the disease, especially in Africa where it is highest, by addressing: Surgery (lid surgery to correct trichiasis); Antibiotics (Zithromax® donated by Pfizer to treat and prevent active infection); Facial cleanliness (to prevent disease transmission); and Environmental change (such as the construction and use of latrines to control flies, and provision of accessible water to allow face washing).

Excitingly, the situation will now change dramatically in six Sub-Saharan countries over the coming five years with the UK government announcing an investment of £39 million to help support the elimination of trachoma in countries like Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania through the SAFE strategy. Being implemented by a consortium of International Coalition for Trachoma Control (ICTC) members and managed by NGO Sightsavers, programme work will begin on the ground in Autumn.

The burden of the disease has already largely been surveyed in these countries, through the UK government supported Global Trachoma Mapping Programme (GTMP). For example Ethiopia, where the GTMP has supported the Ministry of Health to examine 430,000 people across seven regions, has approximately 30 per cent of the known global trachoma burden, so this support is much needed.

For countries such as Chad this crucial investment will see a rapid expansion of the nascent trachoma programmes and will hopefully be a catalyst for further support in fighting trachoma and stopping people needlessly living in pain and ultimately losing their sight.

Whilst this project will see 165,000 trichiasis surgeries performed and almost 10 million people treated with antibiotics, in addition to increasing access to water and instigating behavioural changes to reduce transmission of the disease, there is further good news for the broader NTD community. The implementation of the SAFE strategy and particularly the F&E components will also yield broader benefits including potential reductions in the burden of other infectious diseases, including cholera, typhoid and other NTDs (schistosomiasis, STH, Guinea worm), plus other diarrheal illnesses.

Through the programme, links will be made with other NTD projects in these countries to ensure a holistic push to make a dent in the significant and debilitating burden placed on these poor communities by NTDs such as trachoma. The provision of infrastructure around this planned scale-up of SAFE activities will support control of trachoma and provide a platform for strengthening other NTDs and health interventions.

The ICTC programme Advisory Committee will be providing technical and quality assurance guidance for the programme, which will include support from a series of structured working groups on technical programmatic practices.

Sightsavers itself will be drawing on its expertise of working with partners and Ministries of Health in African nations through other trachoma-related projects such as GTMP, The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust Trachoma Initiative and a DFID-funded UNITED programme to tackle NTDs in Nigeria to ensure efficiencies, collaborations and ultimately success!

UK NGO sets their sights on river blindness

Blindness, NTDs, Onchocerciasis, , , , ,

Sightsavers, a UK-based NGO that addresses preventable blindness in the developing world and contributors to End the Neglect, is this year’s Financial Times (FT) seasonal appeal recipient. Sgithsavers will receive donations from British readers who contribute to the FT appeal, which will run from November 21 – mid-January. The UK government has also agreed to match individual donations made to the appeal. Click here for more information on the appeal. Below an excerpt on the current state of river blindness published in FT:

“The river in Nigeria’s poor, remote northern state of Zamfara has always played a central part in the 70-year-old’s life. He and his friends swam in it as boys “until our eyes were red”. It is a vital source of water for homes, livestock and crops in Mr Adamu’s village of Birninwaje, a fishing and farming community of 3,000 people, where he was for many years the traditional leader. It is also the source of his blindness. River blindness is endemic in these parts. The parasitical disease is named after the black flies that live near flowing waterways such as the Zamfara – and across sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and parts of the Arabian peninsula – and transmit one of the world’s leading causes of blindness.” Click here to read the full article. Also, check Jeremiah Norris’ (Director, Center for Science in Public Policy, Hudson Institute) Letter to the Editor in response to this piece.

 

Is the end in sight for trachoma?

Trachoma, , , world sight day

Happy World Sight Day! In honor of this day, we’re featuring a guest blog post from Simon Bush of SightSavers.

By: Simon Bush, Director of Advocacy and African Alliances at Sightsavers

Trachoma is the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness, affecting an astounding 27.8 million people in Africa alone. According to the International Coalition for Trachoma Control (ICTC), trachoma blinds four people every hour[1].  It is a disease of poverty inextricably linked to a lack of sanitation, which causes repeated eye infections that can lead to blindness if left untreated. It is known as a neglected tropical disease (NTD), meaning that it receives little attention or funding despite its heavy impact on the lives of people suffering from it.

We know from Sightsavers’ work across Africa and Asia, and from the work of other organizations that strategies for controlling blinding NTDs are already proving to be cost effective with a strong record of success, so it seems wrong that a disease like trachoma remains largely ignored and untreated.

This is why today, on World Sight Day, Sightsavers is making the biggest single commitment we have ever made – £62 million ($97.5 million) – to eradicate this terrible disease within the next ten years. We are taking unprecedented steps to ensure that trachoma is eliminated from the 14 African and Asian countries where it is endemic, by 2020.

By treating trachoma, alongside other NTDs such as onchoceriasis and schistosomiasis, we know that we can make a significant difference to people’s lives. Aside from the constant pain of later stage trachoma, called trichaisis, blindness can have a devastating blow on people’s livelihoods in developing countries. As there is often little support available to people living with disabilities in the developing world, they and their families have little chance of ending the cycle that keeps them in poverty, which is why tangible solutions to curing and preventing disability are so important. Continue reading →