A boost to COVID-19 vaccination drive in Togo

Kara – At the edge of a small field in the outskirts of Kara city in northern Togo where a crowd gathered for the annual Evala festival¬—a traditional celebration featuring wrestling contests—in mid-2022, a bright coloured bus drew small groups of people for a crucial issue: COVID-19 vaccination.

Togo eliminates trachoma as a public health problem

Togo has eliminated trachoma, an eye disease that can cause permanent blindness, as a public health problem. The West African nation becomes the fourth country on the continent to be validated by World health Organization (WHO) as having reached the elimination milestone after Morocco in 2016, Ghana in 2018 and The Gambia in 2021. 

Supporting Togo’s health care improvement drive

In collaboration with World Health Organization in Togo, World Bank is supporting the country to improve its health care quality. This includes equipping 14 training schools for paramedical personnel with teaching, computer and videoconferencing materials, with more than 600 nurses and midwives recently trained in infection prevention and care for COVID-19 patients. World Bank Resident Representative in Togo, Hawa Wagué, explains why training is crucial for quality health care.

Midwifery, a life passion

Lomé – Three years ago, Massalou Tchonda, a midwife at the Tsévié Polyclinic near the Togolese capital of Lomé, was attending to a patient expecting twins.

“After the first one came out, the second seemed to be blocked by the placenta. I was convinced the patient wouldn’t be able to give birth on her own,” she recalls. Just as she was hurriedly preparing to perform an emergency evacuation procedure, the other baby’s head appeared. Seconds later, he was out in the world.

Togo is Saying Goodbye to Elephantiasis

No longer ashamed
Mr. Tchazimon Essohanani, 58, is a father of six and principal of a secondary school in Bebeda, 35 km east of Kara, Togo’s second biggest city. 
Essohanani recalls that in 2009, his scrotum and testicles, for no apparent reason, suddenly began to grow bigger and bigger, causing him to suffer embarrassment, shame and frustration due to the stigma. “I have 592 pupils in my school. Everywhere I went, I could ‘feel’ that all eyes were on the bulging part of my trousers. Very often, my wife asked me questions to which I had no answers,” he says.

African Vaccination Week (AVW) Togo

An outreach session was held last Tuesday 23 April 2013, within District 5 of Lome, a peripheral area of the capital city. “People have little access to the health center; that’s why we have got the vaccination services closer to them as per the spirit of the AVW”, explained Mrs TENA Kanma Nanah, Communications Officer at the Epidemiological Division, Ministry of Health. Present at the supervisory visit, officials from the Togo Ministry of Health Togo and WHO Colleagues.