The Rockefeller Foundation Thursday announced a new grant of $12 million to the Africa Public Health Foundation to help expand the geographic coverage of testing and to strengthen contact tracing for COVID-19 in Africa through the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).
“Equitable access to testing and tracing is essential to rapidly identify and respond to COVID-19 outbreaks until a vaccine is widely available to all,” said Rajiv J. Shah, President of The Rockefeller Foundation
while announcing the grant on Thursday.
The funding will support a broader effort to accelerate equitable access to testing technologies, increase testing of asymptomatic persons, and reduce community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the sub-Saharan Africa region.
Africa reportedly has conducted a little more 30 million tests against COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. The grant aims at scaling up testing and tracing health authorities on the continent to have access to more reliable epidemiologic data to advise governments, businesses and the public on how to better manage the pandemic and mitigate its socioeconomic impact.
“Testing is the number one tool to fight this pandemic because without testing we will be fighting blindly,” said Dr John Nkengasong, Director of Africa CDC.
“We also need to trace people who are infected, isolate them and treat them. By supporting African Union Member States to do more testing and tracing to identify and isolate infected persons, we will be able to control the virus and limit transmission” Nkengasong added.
MG/abj/APA