By: Impact Santé Afrique

From June to September 2020, The NGO Impact Santé Afrique (ISA) in partnership with EANNASO organized a series of training sessions in English and French on Community engagement and Gender in malaria programs. These sessions, which occurred over 4 months, connote the interest of malaria civil society to engage more effectively in malaria programs to ensure needs and voices of communities are prioritized.

These trainings aimed to strengthen capacities of local actors (civil society, local NGOs, community-based organizations, also National Malaria Control Programs, Country Coordinating Mechanisms representatives, media, the private sector, parliamentarians, community members) in order to accelerate the response to malaria and programs more effective. Armed with these assets, these actors will also be able to actively participate in the decision-making process for the development of the Global Fund’s countries malaria concept notes. These webinars regularly featured a large number of participants, nearly 100 representatives of organizations from about 30 countries, including several countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and America. Other participants also followed these webinars live on Facebook (50-150 views).

Several themes were addressed during the webinars with recommendations from experts:

– Integrating gender in malaria responses : It is important to integrate gender aspects into malaria programs by addressing gender related barriers in other to inequalities in access to malaria services

– The Malaria Matchbox tool : The malaria matchbox tool in an equity assessment tool to improve the effectiveness of malaria programs. The tool aims to assess barriers related to malaria services and identify vulnerable populations. 

– The Global Fund process and Community Right and Gender Initiative: We aim to reinforce Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) capacities on the Global fund processes and mechanism to engage in the programs.  An accent was placed on the role of CSOs in the Country Coordinating Mechanisms (CCMs), and how to review critically concept note with a community right and gender lense.

– Human Rights and Gender Approaches in Malaria Control Programs : To promote community systems strengthening, Human Rights and Gender-based approaches in Malaria programming.

– Community Led Monitoring : To highlight the importance of the Community Led Monitoring in malaria programs. How the local CSOs can gather, analyze and use information on an ongoing basis to improve access, quality and impact of services. Community led-monitoring also allows to hold service providers and decision to account.

ISA will continue to work with partners like ENNANSO to continue to build capacities of malaria civil society organizations.  For more information and links to all the webinars please visit www.impactsante.org Facebook Twitter