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Director-General of the West African Health Organisation (WAHO), Professor Stanley Okolo has charged countries implementing the Regional Disease Surveillance Systems Enhancement (REDISSE) project to strive to find innovative strategies to address bottlenecks to achieve optimum population impact.

He noted that a World Bank Implementation Status Report that rated the project performance as moderately satisfactory reflects delays in procurement, implementation and disbursement at country level.

According to him, the above-mentioned delays are also associated with delays in recruiting and training project implementation unit staff, attrition rate of staff associated with changes in governments, as well as the delays in establishing steering committees and multi-sector work plans in the first year of the project.

According to him, to date, the project disbursement rate is low, with an average of 17. 2%, of which 26.6% is for REDISSE 1 countries, 13.7% for REDISSE 2 countries, and 7.2% for REDISSE 3 countries, while WAHO disbursement rate is 53% of the International Development Association (IDA) and 87% of the Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) grant.

Speaking at the opening of the fourth Steering Committee Meeting of REDISSE project in Togo’s capital Lome, he stressed the need to address the challenges to ensure that the objectives of the project are achieved.

11 Beneficiary countries
Beneficiary countries are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone Togo and Mauritania.

The REDISSE project is a regional project funded by the World Bank, covering all the 10 ECOWAS countries and Mauritania in five-year phases from 2016 to 2023.

The first phase covers three countries: including Guinea, Senegal and Sierra Leone; the second phase covers four countries: Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Togo.

Its implementation is in the third phase, covering four countries – Benin, Mali, Niger and Mauritania.