The role and contribution of civil society and community actors in COVID-19 prevention and control: the case of the COMVID COVID-19 movement in Burkina Faso.

Communities should play a crucial role in the fight against public health emergencies but ensuring their effective and sustained engagement remains a challenge in many countries. In this article, we describe the process of mobilising community actors to contribute to the fight against COVID-19 in Burkina Faso. During the early days of the pandemic, the national COVID-19 response plan called for the involvement of community actors, but no strategy had been defined for this purpose. The initiative to involve community actors in the fight against COVID-19 was taken, independently of the government, by 23 civil society organisations gathered through a platform called 'Health Democracy and Citizen Involvement (DES-ICI)'. In April 2020, this platform launched the movement 'Communities are committed to Eradicate COVID-19 (COMVID COVID-19)' which mobilised community-based associations organised into 54 citizen health watch units (CCVS) in Ouagadougou city. These CCVS worked as volunteers, performing door-to-door awareness campaigns. The psychosis created by the pandemic, the proximity of civil society organisations to the communities and the involvement of religious, customary and civil authorities facilitated the expansion of the movement. Given the innovative and promising nature of these initiatives, the movement gained recognition that earned them a seat on the national COVID-19 response plan. This gave them credibility in the eyes of the national and international donors, thus facilitating the mobilisation of resources for the continuity of their activities. However, the decrease in financial resources to offset the community mobilisers gradually reduced the enthusiasm for the movement. In a nutshell, the COMVID COVID-19 movement fostered dialogues and collaboration among civil society, community actors and the Ministry of Health, which plans to engage the CCVS beyond the COVID-19 response, for the implementation of other actions within the national community health policy.

Reinforcing locally led solutions for universal health coverage: a logic model with applications in Benin, Namibia and Uganda.

Development assistance for health programmes is often characterised as donor-led models with minimal country ownership and limited sustainability. This article presents new ways for low-income and middle-income countries to gain more control of their development assistance programming as they move towards universal health coverage (UHC). We base our findings on the experience of the African Collaborative for Health Financing Solutions (ACS), an innovative US Agency for International Development-funded project. The ACS project stems from the premise that the global health community can more effectively support UHC processes in countries if development partners change three long-standing paradigms: (1) time-limited projects to enhancing long-lasting processes, (2) fly-in/fly-out development support to leveraging and strengthening local and regional expertise and (3) static knowledge creation to supporting practical and co-developed resources that enhance learning and capture implementation experience. We assume that development partners can facilitate progress towards UHC if interventions follow five action steps, including (1) align to country demand, (2) provide evidence-based and tailored health financing technical support, (3) respond to knowledge and learnings throughout activity design and implementation, (4) foster multi-stakeholder collaboration and ownership and (5) strengthen accountability mechanisms. Since 2017, the ACS project has applied these five action steps in its implementing countries, including Benin, Namibia and Uganda. This article shares with the global health community preliminary achievements of implementing a unique, challenging but promising experience.