ReCCAP, three years on

date Published on 27/06/2022

Wednesday, 22 June 2022, Bissau - ENDA Santé, organised a regional advocacy, evaluation and closing workshop for the ReCCAP project in Guinea Bissau from 21 to 23 June 2022.

This workshop chaired by Dr Timòteo Oliveira, representing the Minister of Public Health of Guinea Bissau and attended by the Executive Secretary of the National HIV Council, the various national HIV programmes of Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, and Senegal, aimed to review the activities carried out during the 3 years of implementation, evaluation and advocacy for the use of research results for better planning and targeting of interventions.

This was an opportunity for participants to review the results of the three years of implementation and the many opportunities offered by the project that must be seized by the various national programmes in Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Guinea Bissau and Senegal for better HIV care. 

Provision of strategic information for HIV programmes

Speaking about capacity building of the actors of the response, the executive secretary of the CNLS of Guinea Bissau, Fatimata Djaray Diallo, mentions the pool of local experts in the fields of mapping and estimating the size of the populations most exposed to HIV, made available to the countries. They are in fact 45 referent trainers and more than 160 actors in the HIV response, called CARTOLOC, who are equipped and capable of carrying out programmatic studies: developing research protocols, collecting information in the field and translating the results into recommendations specific to the different contexts.

Moreover, with the support of the project, 7 studies have been carried out in the project's implementing countries. These have generated localised strategic information on populations at risk of HIV and shared by national programmes. 

Nguissali Turpin, deputy director of ENDA Santé, focused on opportunities in terms of perspectives and advocacy. For her, it is imperative that programmes use the human resources trained under the project and the available data generated by this research to better target and refine interventions. She also advocates networking and promotion of the health ecosystem to meet the challenges of the response. 

She concluded by saying that the ReCCAP project can claim to have contributed to a better understanding of local HIV epidemics in the four countries and to have made the slogan "know your epidemic, know your response" a reality.  

The Capacity Building and Experience Capitalisation for Improved HIV Care in West Africa (ReCCAP) project is coordinated by ENDA Santé and implemented in Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Guinea Bissau and Senegal with the financial support of Expertise France through the Initiative.

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