A team of researchers in Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Niger will spend five years co-designing and testing new ways to detect and manage high blood pressure, diabetes, and common mental health problems through local primary care clinics. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are rising sharply across West Africa, but healthcare systems there were built to fight infectious diseases and often ignore these chronic conditions. Existing programmes tend to be disease-specific and rarely involve local communities. This leaves millions without access to basic screening, diagnosis, or ongoing care for conditions that quietly disable and kill. If the centre succeeds, it will produce context-tailored intervention packages—adapted international guidelines, staff training, and a community-based platform for early detection—that could be rolled out across the region. The work also aims to build a lasting cadre of African-led NCD researchers embedded in supportive institutions, shifting the long-term balance of research capacity from foreign-led projects to locally sustained expertise. For policymakers and frontline workers, the payoff is practical: evidence on what actually works to integrate NCD care into weak health systems, rather than imported solutions that fail on the ground.
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There is an urgent need for improving control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in West Africa, where healthcare has been traditionally neglected and driven by disease-specific programmes, with limited engagement of local communities. In addressing this, and responding to demand from policymakers, the Centre will facilitate people-centred, integrated and system-wide approaches to NCD control, which are responsive to communities, policymakers and frontline workers. This will be through a coherent programme of work, leading to improved capacity, research excellence and policy impact in three Anglophone and Francophone countries: Burkina Faso, Ghana and Niger. Our goal is to contribute to improved health and wellbeing of populations in West Africa, through comprehensive and sustainable capacity strengthening for high-quality applied NCD research to inform improved prevention, screening, primary care diagnosis and management/referrals of interrelated hypertension, diabetes and common mental health problems. Our ambition is to leave a legacy of excellent African-led NCD research by high-calibre researchers embedded within supportive institutions and networks, which will contribute to improved health outcomes, wellbeing and wider socio-cultural-economic benefits in West Africa. The Centre s work will comprise three phases (see uploads 8-9): phase 1 (months 1-12) will deepen our understanding of country contexts of enabling healthy lives, provision and utilisation of primary care NCD services, and help contextualise available evidence of effective interventions to West Africa. In phase 2 (months 13-24), we will work closely with communities, policymakers and practitioners to co-produce context-tailored intervention packages. These will include adapting international clinical guidelines to local contexts and staff support in implementing these, and designing a community-based platform for prevention and early-detection of NCDs. In phase 3 (months 25-60), we will pilot-test, then implement and evaluate the interventions, and will develop lessons for improving NCD control in West Africa. Continuous engagements with local communities and other stakeholders (e.g. practitioners, policymakers) will ensure adequate dissemination, communication and uptake. This will include understanding stakeholder perspectives, and proactively involving them in co-production, implementation and evaluation of interventions packages. We will use comprehensive and sustainable approaches to capacity strengthening, improving individual, organisational and system-level capacities of: (a) researchers, particularly earlier-career staff, for high-quality applied NCD research, (b) local communities, to engage with and improve behaviours and decisions affecting their health and (c) policymakers and practitioners, to implement evidence-based NCD interventions. This will be achieved through a combination of post-graduate training, short courses and workshops, structured mentorship support, cross-organisational exchange and learning, communities of practice and the co-production process itself. We will maintain equitable bilingual (English/French) partnerships, through shared cross-organisational leadership of workpackages and research themes by senior and earlier-career staff, and distributed management roles. We will ensure continuous production, and widest dissemination, of high-quality outputs such as videos, briefs, guidelines, papers, workshop and conference presentations.
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