Reverend Dr Joyce Aryee, Ambassador for Neglected Tropical Disease (NTDs), has emphasised the need to make the fight against the NTDs a local ownership project.
She said community and local-led ownership for health issues, including the fight against NTDs, were critical to effectively deal with the issues and for sustainability.
Dr Aryee said this in a speech read on her behalf by Dr Hafez Adam Tayer, Chairman for the Intra-Country Coordinating Committee for NTDs at a Regional Town Hall NTDs Advocacy Meeting in Ho, in the Volta Region.
“By fostering community-led initiatives, we take ownership of our health. This ensures that our strategies are not just effective but tailored to our unique needs,” she said.
She said the successful interventions against NTDs contributed to meeting other Sustainable Development Goals such as alleviating poverty, hunger and creating decent work opportunities for economic growth.
Dr Aryee said, in Ghana, each district was at least endemic with two NTDs, but the government through the Ghana Health Service had employed strategies towards addressing the issues.
She said every stakeholder had a unique role to play in addressing issues of NTDs in the areas of advocacy, sensitisation, community mobilisation and local resources mobilisation.
The Ambassador said prioritising effort against NTDs, the citizens were contributing to building a more equitable, healthy and sustainable world for current and future generations.
Dr Aryee noted that local government structure should be a pivotal point for rallying efforts by multi-sectoral stakeholders geared at NTDs control and elimination.
She said controlling NTDs required a multi-faceted and collaborative approach involving local communities, government, and non-governmental organisations.
Dr. Joseph Opare, Acting Programmes Manager, NTDs Programme, said NTDs were a group of preventable and treatable diseases that affected the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
He said there were 20 NTDs and globally about two million people were suffering from these diseases, however, out of the 20 only 14 of them were identified in Ghana.
These diseases, he said, included, yaws, buruli ulcer, schistosomiasis, leprosy, trachoma, onchocerciasis, lymphatic filariasis, soil transmitted helminthiasis and human Africa trypanosomiasis also known as sleeping sickness.
The Programmes Manager said, Ghana, was, however, free from the human Africa trypanosomiasis as none of such cases was recorded in the country since the beginning of this year, but called for collaborative effort to deal with the issues.
Dr Archibald Yao Letsa, Volta Regional Minister, called on stakeholders to dig deeper into their respective fields of expertise, work together, and break the chain of neglected tropical diseases.
