The often-fractious working relationship between the World Health Organization and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention is getting a reset.
Tensions have emerged since Africa CDC’s launch in 2017. The agency was tasked, alongside WHO’s regional offices for Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, with helping countries mount their responses to public health emergencies. The two entities have struggled in the past to coordinate that support. Instead, duplicate health supplies and contradictory guidelines were sometimes sent out, leading to waste and confused country teams.
“For me, the more disturbing and the most stressful is when you go to the country and you see that inefficiency,” the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Valerie Nkamgang Bemo tells my colleague Sara Jerving.