EVENT: Enhancing Community-Based Disease Outbreak Detection and Response in East and Southern Africa Project Launch Workshop

From the 5-7 August 2015, Connecting Organizations for Regional Disease Surveillance (CORDS), working in close collaboration with two of its constituent networks Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance (SACIDS) and East African Integrated Disease Surveillance Network (EAIDSnet),  will be holding a launch workshop in Arusha, Northern Tanzania, to bring together key stakeholders from the mobile technologies project  ‘Enhancing community based disease outbreak detection and response in East and Southern Africa’.

This three day event, sponsored by Skoll Global Threats Fund, will bring together health experts from the animal and health sectors, ICT experts and community members to discuss, refine and agree on how to collaborate in providing solutions to challenges facing disease detection using One Health community based approaches supported by mobile technologies.  This high profile meeting will host participants from all six CORDS regional networks, with representation from 15 countries.  In addition to representatives from the networks, participants from donor agencies Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD) and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) will also attend.  This meeting builds on the successful Epihack Tanzania event held in December 2014, which brought together various stakeholders to develop novel technology based solutions to enable faster disease detection. Participants will work together to take these solutions forward, and agree on a common strategy for improving global disease surveillance and information sharing.