World Tuberculosis Day: Raphael Godlove Ahenu, the Founder and CEO of Global Media Foundation, has emphasized the necessity for significant capital investment to scale up Tuberculosis (TB) priority interventions in order to eliminate the TB epidemic in Ghana by 2035.
He believes the government should be more concerned about raising funding for TB interventions in the country.
Mr. Ahenu said in a statement released in Accra to mark World TB Day this year that immediate actions must be done to strengthen program administration, coordination, monitoring, and evaluation, as well as operations research, to support TB and HIV treatment and screening methods.
“Scaling up to expedited universal access to TB control as the national response to the devastating epidemic through a comprehensive strategic plan established with the support and active participation of all stakeholders should be the way to go,” he said.
He noted that throughout the years, marginalized and vulnerable individuals’ participation in the development of the TB strategic plan has been restricted, and that “a determined effort to get them involved in TB interventions” should be made.
This, according to Mr. Ahenu, will aid community mobilization by increasing active TB/HIV case discovery in remote communities while also raising community members’ awareness and understanding of the disease.
“As the Bono Regional Coordinator of the Ghana Coalition of NGOs in Health, I can confidently declare that the public still believes that tuberculosis is a spiritual disease, thus we must do more to assist reduce TB and HIV stigma in our communities,” he said.
Mr. Ahenu disclosed that the Global Media Foundation is focused on community-level behavior change communication and prevention in its new strategic plan for TB/HIV control from 2021 to 2024.
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This, he claims, would improve community members’ understanding and knowledge of tuberculosis and HIV, as well as stigma reduction concerns in rural areas across the country.
“It will also promote community mobilization in remote places to increase adoption of active TB/HIV case discovery,” he said.
He said that the foundation will create and distribute TB/HIV information, education, and communication materials and booklets to the country’s most at-risk community members, particularly in rural areas.
