Sightsavers News: Health programme exceeds several first-year targets

The Ascend West Africa and Central Africa programme, part of Ascend, the UK aid flagship health programme, delivered nine million treatments more than originally envisioned during its first year of operation.

In March, the programme also launched an unprecedented adaptation of the programme to help combat COVID-19. This included strengthening contact tracing and surveillance systems and developing and promoting COVID-19 prevention messaging through mass media campaigns, ensuring that they also reached people with disabilities and other populations at risk.

Some of the achievements of the programme include:

• Supporting health ministries in the Democratic Republic of Congo to deliver more than 48 million treatments for four NTDs, eight million over the original target.
• Providing 59 million treatments in Nigeria, including 18 million for river blindness. Follow-up surveys in two states subsequently showed that river blindness cases had decreased to a level where provisional approval was given to stop treatment campaigns there.
• Supporting treatment delivered to over 1.7 million school-age children across 28 endemic districts in Côte d’Ivoire in its first year – 151,000 over target.
• Specifically targeting schistosomiasis treatments campaigns at school-age children and adults expected to be at higher risk of infection.
• Supported the training of more than 375,000 community volunteers and teachers to deliver the treatments for five NTDs across the 13 programme countries.

Read more here

Have a look at the Ascend West and Central Africa Interactive story map.