The action for development and empowerment (ADE) organized a meeting, aimed at promoting conversation about vaccines equity, distribution, hesitancy and government commitment to the health sector, actions for development and empowerment organized a meeting with health personnel of the west region of Cameroon. This meeting organized under the banner of CTAP took place on Tuesday June 20th, 2023.
This event had as main goals to initiate conversations on the vaccine equity, performance of the expanded program on immunization coverage in the West Region and Cameroon in general. It focused on the presentation of the COVID-19 transparency and Accountability project.
Data collection on the difficulties encountered by health workers during vaccination and to put in place a concerted strategy to strengthen immunization in the west region.
The meeting started at about 11:00am with a word of welcome from ADE’s Co-founder, Administrative Officer and Nono AlidaEpse Donfack. Who later encouraged participants to engage in the conversation of the day for the resolution were going to be used for advocacy to the right authorities.
ADE et CTAP Presentations
For better comprehension, ADE was presented by Nkweti Sidoan Tewah, Communication Officer, She explained that ADE is a non-governmental organization created in 2019 by two dynamic ladies with the aim of empowering youths to act on issues surrounding them. She further presented ADE’s thematic areas; good governance and democracy, girl child education and sustainable development goals education.
She precised that we were all gathered for the event under the canopy of Follow The Money, CTAP, Vaccine Equity which falls under ADE’s vision of good governance and democracy. She pointed out that CTAP is a pan African project implemented in 9 African countries and that it previously had phase I and II and currently phase III known as Vaccine Equity. She mentioned that this phase of the project is sponsored by Hilton and Skoll Foundations and executed by Connected Development and BudgIT Foundation. She then pleaded with participants to follow ADE and Follow The Money Cameroon’s Social media handles for updates by reading them out to the participants. Through the presentation of the analysis report on the Covid-19 vaccine, Mr. MBOUSSI Lionel, ADE‘s Project Manager, first presented CTAP, its financial partners (Skoll and Hilton Foundation), the organizations in charge of piloting it ( Connected Development and Budget Foundation) as well as the countries in which CTAP is being implemented. The second part of his presentation focused on the importance of vaccination, the inequity observed in the distribution of covid-19 vaccines by different African countries and the region, and the urgent need for Africa to finance and encourage research into the manufacture of vaccines made in Africa. The third part of his presentation consisted of an overview of vaccine coverage rates by country, potential causes and recommendations for remedying them.
Health workers of this region were very expressive as regards what they go through on a daily basis. They expressed discontent at the fact that vaccines take so much longer than expected to enter the region; “the difficulty of the vaccine is a complex problem for us. It was more than six months before we received the Covid vaccine” said Mr. Carlos. In this light, participants mentioned that the BCG vaccine took about seven months to arrive after there was a rupture of stock. The Rotavirus vaccine and DT vaccine for pregnant women were also confirmed to have been delayed before arrival. While on the field, these health workers confirmed that when a vaccine takes a long time to arrive in a particular region, citizens assume that the government is looking for a way to inject the Covid vaccine into them. Another reason for the delay of these vaccines according to Mr.
Pagui is that when sponsors see dissatisfactory immunization coverage figures, they are not inspired to send more vaccines thus PHC centres with high figures often receive their vaccines on time.
These meeting globally permitted to analyze government developments health strategies which is unevenly distributed.
