Feature Stories

How wastewater surveillance is helping the COVID-19 fight

Accra/Lusaka/Pretoria —Twice a week, a team of scientists from South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) traverses the country’s metropolitan areas, visiting up to 50 wastewater treatment sites to fill bottles with effluent. The bottles are sealed and disinfected, then transported to a network of laboratories across the country where their contents will be tested for the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Aminata Kaoucen, Nurse

Aminata Kaoucen works as a nurse for a local NGO called Action pour le Bien-Être in Southern Niger, where she attends to refugees from neighbouring Nigeria at an integrated health centre in the Garin Kaka refugee camp.

 Reducing out-of-pocket health expenditure a panacea to universal health coverage 

Abuja, 13 December, 2022 - “I recall growing up in a comfortable home and lacking nothing until my father fell ill in 2010. I was in secondary school when his sickness started.  He was a farmer and businessman who sell cocoa in Ondo state, southwest Nigeria, says Adetutu Ibironke, a mother of one residing in Abuja, Nigeria. 

She says her father’s sickness started like malaria and seems to be no cause for alarm until he began frequenting the hospital. 

Curbing maternal mortality in Côte d'Ivoire

It is vaccination day, baby cries fill the courtyard of the Botro General Hospital, about 400 kilometres north of Abidjan. Henriette Ouattara, who gave birth a few months ago at the maternity hospital in Botro, has come to have her baby vaccinated.

Bringing care closer to eliminate cervical cancer

For several years many women across Guinea lacked access to screening services for cervical cancer—the most common cancer among women—especially in remote areas. A concerted push by the health authorities to integrate cervical cancer screening in sexual and reproductive health services, thousands of women now have the chance of early detection and adequate support.