Initiated and funded by the Global Fund, this workshop aimed to focus on community-based interventions and paediatric tuberculosis. Several partners were involved in this meeting, namely: WHO/GTB, WHO/TDR, Stop TB, Union, Action Damien, UNICEF, EGPAF. The organization was coordinated by the Executive Secretariat of the Swiss TB TB networks. In total, 88 participants attended this meeting, including 45 from NTPs and structures involved in tuberculosis control from 15 countries, namely: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Mali, Niger, CAR, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Chad.
The opening ceremony of this important workshop was presided over by the Minister of Health himself and was attended by the representative of the Global Fund, the representative of STOP TB Partnership, the representative of the WHO Resident Representative in Benin, the Executive Secretary of WARN/ CARN-TB and the President of the Association des Anciens Patients Tuberculeux du Bénin (ASSAP-TB). In his opening remarks, the Minister stressed the importance of taking the community into account in all TB control strategies because he said: “TB is born in the community and ends in the community…”. He reiterated the need to ensure a more vigorous fight against paediatric tuberculosis if we are to achieve the ambitious targets set by the high-level meeting on tuberculosis at the United Nations General Assembly held in September 2018 in New York.
The programme of the 03 days of the workshop was punctuated by the presentation of the themes on the agenda and the debates generated by the various communications, the summaries of which are presented in the following lines.
