In Muso’s latest news, they covered our partnership and their collaboration with government partners to quantify and supply more than six million pieces of PPE to Mali and Côte d’Ivoire.
Muso has served as an operational research partner to the Malian Ministry of Health for more than a decade, working to design, test and scale strategies for rapid, universal health care. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Mali last year, its risks to Malian health workers and patients under-scored the importance of our collaboration to build a national health system that can respond to crises with speed. Even before the first cases arrived at Mali’s borders, Muso began working with our government partners to develop strategies to outrace COVID-19 and strengthen health systems in Mali.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the world, its impact traveled the fault lines of existing global inequities. It was quickly clear that without an immense effort, frontline providers in low-resource settings would not receive sufficient protection. Muso and our partners identified the need to provide health care workers as one of the key priorities in responding to the pandemic. With this effort in mind, Muso mobilized urgently to source enough personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect Community Health Workers and community health center staff across Mali. Together with the COVID-19 Action Fund for Africa (CAF-Africa), we secured shipments to supply over six million pieces of PPE to Mali and Côte d’Ivoire, based on needs projections Muso conducted with our government partners. CAF-Africa, a collaboration between partners at the Community Health Impact Coalition, Direct Relief, the Pandemic Action Network, and the Community Health Acceleration Partnership, was created with the goal of procuring and distributing PPE to CHWs and other frontline providers in 24 African countries. As of January 2021, CAF-Africa has mobilized 57 million pieces of PPE.
In late December, Muso and Malian Ministry of Health leaders gathered for an official ceremony at the Yirimadio health center to celebrate the progress of our partnership in addressing COVID-19 and the arrival of a shipment of medical equipment, including PPE and medical oxygen supplies, worth over $1.8 million USD.
Malian Minister of Health Dr. Fanta Siby received the shipment, noting that universal health coverage will not become a reality in Mali without the support of partners like Muso.
Muso and our Malian government partners have spent the past fifteen years designing and testing health systems that cure delay. Our response together to COVID-19 builds upon this foundational work. In the past year of mobilizing to respond to the pandemic, we have moved faster to protect populations and health workers, trained thousands of health care providers, deployed monitors and tracers to outbreak zones, and diagnosed and cared for patients across the country. These efforts will continue in 2021 to meet the ongoing challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. The PPE ceremony marked an important moment celebrating our collaboration and hard work of this year, and our shared commitment to building a stronger health system for the future.