Surveillance and Disease Intelligence

Goal

Strengthened health-related surveillance systems for improved public health decision-making and action.

Strategic Objectives

1. Establish event-based surveillance as an important mechanism for early warning, risk assessment, disease predictions, and response.
2. Support establishment and strengthening of National Public Health Institutes to coordinate surveillance systems in a multi-sectoral approach and ensure that surveillance data informs national policy and public health actions.
3. Strengthen implementation of the existing surveillance systems (such as Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response IDSR) within Member States and ensure linkages with the animal, agriculture and environmental sectors.
4. Support countries to strengthen disease-specific surveillance systems for priority diseases (e.g. HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis and non-communicable diseases) appropriate for the African context.
5. Facilitate and strengthen the Regional Collaborating Centres to promote inter-country and regional collaboration on surveillance, shared data use, and engagement with laboratory networks.
6. Support enhanced Field Epidemiology Training Programme (FETP) to strengthen knowledge and competency in study design and statistical analysis of meta and demographic data.
7. Assist Member States in developing a surveillance workforce that is sufficient to support national responsibilities, as well as continued development of tools that support strengthening of the workforce to support IDSR and the International Health Regulation (IHR) requirements.