Over Rwf60bn needed to reinforce Rwanda's epidemic preparedness

A total of Rwf66 billion is needed to implement a strategic epidemic preparedness, detection and response plan in Rwanda, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH). MoH, along with other different stakeholders have been working together to review what is needed for Rwanda to have an emergency preparedness plan to achieve health security. Some of the challenges discovered included limited capacity for human resource. Dr Tharcisse Mpunga, the state minister in charge of Primary Healthcare, said that key people are to be trained and deployed in different centres, we need training centres for the preparedness plan. We are working with stakeholders to review our national emergency and preparedness response plan to make sure it is aligned with the requirements we need in terms of responding to the crises we are facing today. Rwanda and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have come up with three flagship initiatives to scale up their capacity in emergency response, according to information from MoH’s website. The five-year initiatives were launched on September 19 during a high-level meeting between the Ministry of Health and WHO / Regional Office for Africa (WHO AFRO) team alongside other partners. According to WHO AFRO, the three flagship initiatives will initially be implemented in few selected countries, and later be scaled up regionally. Rwanda has been selected to participate in the pilot process of the three initiatives. Mpunga said the initiative has come at a critical moment, and that although the country is recovering from Covid19, there is another pandemic (Ebola) in the neighbouring country. He further explained that the initiative comes due to the challenges countries faced during the global pandemic where health systems were affected and made governments realise gaps in infrastructure, human resource, response and preparedness coordination at all levels. Dr Brain Chirombo, the WHO representative in Rwanda, said that, “the lessons we learnt from Covid-19 clearly showed that developed and developing countries were not ready for the Pandemic.” Chirombo mentioned that Rwanda is one of the countries selected by WHO because it had a robust response and approach used during the pandemic. Wondimagegnehu Alemu, the senior advisor at WHO African region, said that this is a regional initiative with 47 countries and that it is about strengthening health security in the region but it starts by ensuring security in individual countries. “Why this time? We have learnt a lot from the pandemic and we have added that to the preparedness plan. We look at three areas of coordination which are the national experts, human resource, communication and community engagement,” he said.

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Over Rwf60bn needed to reinforce Rwanda's epidemic preparedness