Ouestaf, other newpapers to expose challenges in healthcare across Africa

The partners will also focus on the extent of the Ebola outbreak – which is still prevalent in Guinea and Sierra Leone, more than a year-and-a-half after the first case was reported in Guinea. The various reports will expose the dysfunctions and mismanagement of health systems and services in the region.Ouestaf News, Daily Trust and […]

The partners will also focus on the extent of the Ebola outbreak – which is still prevalent in Guinea and Sierra Leone, more than a year-and-a-half after the first case was reported in Guinea.
The various reports will expose the dysfunctions and mismanagement of health systems and services in the region.
Ouestaf News, Daily Trust and its other partners will start the publication in phases by June of a regional project focusing on West African health systems in the context of the Ebola crisis.
Ouestaf News and its partners will publish a series of reports, in-depth stories, interviews, profiles, etc., on the state of national health systems, emphasizing their weaknesses.
About 15 journalists assigned by Ouestaf and its partners have been working independently on the topic for weeks. They examined different aspects of the health systems: be they the shortage of doctors in Nigeria, medical negligence or errors in Senegal, neglected diseases in Ghana, the cost of medical evacuations in Guinea, the impact of Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone, etc.
The project was initiated by Ouestaf News and implemented with the support of OSIWA (Open Society Initiative for West Africa). It aims at producing high quality journalism in order to inform decision makers and the public on the need to find lasting solutions to the health crisis. 
The investigation revealed lack of facilities, of human resources, and at times mismanagement of the few available resources, or professional flaws.
At the same time, huge amounts of money are spent by governments to send abroad a privileged minority to be cured for diseases as benign as a cold.
The journalists working on this project feel concerned by the media coverage of the Ebola crisis, which mainly focused on the death count and sensational information.
A situation which created trauma and stigma amongst the populations, without dealing with the root causes of this disaster and its impact on the infected communities.
A total of four Francophone and four Anglophone countries have been covered by Ouestaf News and its partners are: Le Progrès (Benin), The Daily Graphic (Ghana), LaRépublique (Guinea), Front Page Africa (Liberia), Les Echos (Mali), Daily Trust (Nigeria), Enquête (Senegal) and Politico (Sierra Leone).