Jhpiego’s teams in West Africa are meeting the COVID-19 pandemic head on—building on trusted relationships with governments, nurtured over decades of working together to strengthen health care systems, to ensure that services remain accessible and available.

In Burkina Faso, Jhpiego is supporting 32 hospitals to produce hydroalcoholic gel used to sterilize surfaces and prevent infections, while also supplying providers with personal protective equipment. Alongside the Ministry of Health (MOH), Jhpiego trained 6,878 health care providers on COVID-19 prevention and control guidelines, including through mobile mentoring.

In Guinea, Jhpiego joined the MOH to develop national contingency plans to safeguard health services during the pandemic, share job aids and guidelines for service provision, and initiate and support the integration of COVID-19 information into the national health tracking system. To boost data-reporting efforts, Jhpiego Guinea and the US Agency for International Development provided the ministry with Internet-enabled tablets to connect data personnel with contact tracing teams—critical to stopping community spread of COVID-19. As president of Guinea’s COVID-19 Scientific Commission, Jhpiego Country Director Yolande Hyjazi leads 17 colleagues as they advise the government on a robust response to the pandemic.

Across eight countries in Francophone Africa, Jhpiego is helping drive a family planning initiative that puts care in the hands of women through contraceptive self-injection. Côte d’Ivoire and Mali represent two of these countries.

In Côte d’Ivoire, the pandemic delayed national scale-up of the contraceptive subcutaneous depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA-SC), including the rollout of self-injection. To ensure the program will continue, Jhpiego, in partnership with the MOH, adapted to virtual rather than in-person trainings on provision of DMPA-SC. Jhpiego is now working with the Ivoirian Midwifery Association to conduct these virtual trainings via Zoom.

In Mali, Jhpiego is supporting the government scale-up of DMPA-SC with comprehensive trainings for health facilities in the capital, Bamako. With extra precautions and a limited number of providers trained at one time, Jhpiego prepared 175 health workers on DMPA-SC administration and self-injection in private facilities in Bamako. These providers will educate 4,200 women about self-injection before year’s end. A self-injection instruction video also was translated into Bambara, Mali’s most widely spoken language, to facilitate greater access to DMPA-SC.

In Madagascar, our malaria team moved much of our work in prevention of malaria in pregnancy to a virtual platform and included COVID-19 prevention messages in our outreach activities. Jhpiego is sharing technical guidance with the Ministry of Public Health, adapting job aids and materials for health workers in districts across the country, and organizing donation of personal protective equipment for staff.