USAID/BASICS Concludes its Senegal Country Program
March 31—After more than twelve years of work in Senegal, USAID/BASICS culminated its country program there today. The project is phasing out the majority of its country programs in 2009.
At the height of its Senegal activities, nearly 25 locally-based USAID/BASICS staff were providing technical assistance to 29 districts in 6 regions for nutrition, newborn health, integrated management of childhood illnesses, and vaccination, behavior change communications, advocacy, and social mobilization.
In 2007, USAID/BASICS's Senegal program shifted solely to the Fatick region, where it has been facilitating a broad-based strategy for quality treatment of pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria at the community level, as well as improved newborn care in health facilities. The project was the first technical assistance project to support health programming in Fatick, whose 123,000 children under the age of five represent 7% of Senegal's national population in that age group.
The Fatick program featured an 18-member partnership led collaboratively by the regional Ministry of Health and USAID/BASICS, who worked together to ensure effective, region-wide coverage of community case management interventions by leveraging resources and establishing standard implementation approaches across implementing partners. With the departure of USAID/BASICS, USAID's Programme de Santé-Santé Communautaire (USAID/PSSC) will now become the Ministry's co-coordinator of the Fatick partnership.
In less than two years, the Fatick initiative succeeded in training 233 community health workers from 172 village "health huts" to manage pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. More than 1,000 cases of childhood illness have been treated or referred to health facilities (in severe cases) thus far, and the number of sick children receiving attention is ever-increasing. USAID/BASICS also provided essential newborn care training to midwives and nurses from 94% of the Fatick region's health facilities. Among improvements already noted as the result of training, proper umbilical cord cutting and care has risen from 16% of deliveries to 70%, and early initiation of breastfeeding (i.e., within one hour of birth) has improved to 71% from 20%.
Taking these successes into account, USAID/Senegal Health Office Director, Akau Kwateng-Ado, remarked, "Perinatal and neonatal health have long been neglected in child survival programming. I am proud to know that, thanks to the support of our organization, they have become key components of Senegal's national child survival program, along with the treatment of acute respiratory infections at the community level."