An effective response to COVID-19 has to be strongly grounded in the community. This was central to the design of Africa CDC’s Partnership to Accelerate COVID-19 Testing (PACT), a programme supported by the Rockefeller Foundation through the Africa Public Health Foundation.
Philani Siphiwo Dlamini (left) is a Community Health Workerwith Red Cross Eswatini. When he speaks, you can tell he is passionate about being a volunteer and his commitment to service is exceptional. Together with the Africa CDC team, we accompanied him on a door-to-door visit in Mahwalala area. He added “If I help other families, my family will also be assisted when need be. We should all look out for each other”. He ensures his community is well informed on all matters related to COVID-19.
“Success to me is when after relaying information, a community member calls to ask for directions to a vaccination centre or to say the information we equipped them with came in handy to save or explore a situation”.
Philani Siphiwo Dlamini
An effective response to COVID-19 has to be strongly grounded in the community. This was central to the design of Africa CDC’s Partnership to Accelerate COVID-19 Testing (PACT), a programme supported by the Rockefeller Foundation through the Africa Public Health Foundation.
The PACT initiative supports African Union Member States to boost COVID-19 response by extending community health workers capacity, knowledge, and numbers to detect cases, trace contacts, create awareness and understanding, provide household support and develop community solutions.
Through this initiative, we are working with partners to train and deploy Community Health Workers in Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, the Republic of Congo and Eswatini.
Through the project, community health workers have:
- Visited more than 2.5 million households
- Identified more that 1.6 million contacts
- Linked 8% of suspected cases to laboratories for testing
- Reached more than 3 million people through risk communication and community engagement sessions
