Georgia Burford, one of CHASE Africa’s Programmes & Partnership Managers, and Mariana Díaz, CHASE Africa’s Development & Operations Manager enjoyed participating in the two day conference held from 18-19 March 2024.
The summit, ‘Accelerating Collaborative Approaches to Health Workforce Sustainability and Antimicrobial Stewardship’, organised by Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET), focussed on three core themes:
1. Sustainable partnerships and alliances that transcend borders.
2. Health workforce mobility, including diaspora health workers.
3. Addressing the critical challenge of escalating antibiotic resistance.
Georgia Burford was invited to present during one of the breakout sessions, Sharing and Learning: Building equitable health partnerships.
Georgia shared CHASE Africa’s learning and expertise on why we believe equitable health partnerships are important and how we achieve true equitability.
CHASE Africa believes it is fundamental to the quality and sustainability of our programmes that we:
- embed equity and inclusion from the start.
- identify a local community partner who has overlapping values and goals in reaching the most underserved communities with health information and services.
- support organisations to launch a health programme in partnership with the Ministry of Health with a formal Memorandum of Understanding with clear roles and responsibilities.
Georgia joined fellow speakers Dr Linda Gibson from Nottingham Trent University, and Mathilde Wange, Menaka Jayakody and Megan Jones from THET.
An independent consultancy recently reviewed our approach and published an Evaluation Report to provide lessons and guide our future strategy.
The particular strengths that our partners identified as reasons why CHASE Africa is their partner of choice are that we:
- Invest time and resources in our partners to source data and interrogate this to identify needs and gaps to inform our interventions
- Use data to adapt our programmes to the local context
- Actively engage with local stakeholders beyond Ministry of Health, and how we link with other NGOs, government departments e.g. following up cases of defilement with children’s service/judiciary department
- Support our partners to diversify funding.
Staff from CHASE Africa and our local partners at the annual CHASE Africa Partner Conference 2024
CHASE Africa has recently been awarded a Global Health Workforce Programme (GHWP) grant by the Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET).
Our project will improve the confidence and practice of Healthcare Workers, so that we can enhance the quality of care offered to clients accessing Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health services in Meru County.
The project is funded through the Global Health Workforce Programme, which is funded by the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) for the benefit of the UK and partner country health sectors.