Sustainable Health Security - Africa

Team Europe Initiative with Africa on sustainable health security using a One Health approach 

The Transformational Potential:

• Overall aim: To strengthen existing health security and research structures for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response and for tackling AMR in Africa, using a multi-level (continental, sub-regional, national and community), interdisciplinary One Health approach (including human, veterinarian [medicine] as well as environmental health). 
• General objective: To support the strengthening of IHR-PVS core capacities in Africa and the implementation of -and alignment towards- African continental and regional Health Security and One Health policies, notably the operationalization of RISLNETs in each sub-region and of African public health workforce development strategies.

The Team Europe Proposal:

Preliminary mapping of ongoing support: identified 145 different ongoing One Health initiatives.

The specific objectives are: 

• SO1. To strengthen the coordinated, multisectoral prevention, preparedness planning and outbreak response to infectious threats.
• SO2. To develop and strengthen the African public health workforce.
• SO3. To interoperate and integrate human, veterinarian, and environmental sectors into existing surveillance systems, to enable data sharing with national, regional, and global institutions.
• SO4. To strengthen human, veterinarian laboratories and genomic surveillance activities within integrated OH laboratory networks.
• SO5. To scale up good practices and formulate evidence-based public health policies.

Work packages planned include:

• Work package 1. Preparedness planning and coordinated outbreak response
• Work package 2. Human capacity building and training (with a focus on gender equality)
• Work package 3: Integrated One Health surveillance
• Work package 4. Integrated One Health laboratory networks
• Work package 5. Implementation Research (to bridge the gap between research and practice)