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. 2025 Jul;45(4):375-384.
doi: 10.1177/2752535X241256414. Epub 2024 May 30.

Health Planning in Times of COVID-19 in Burkina Faso: The Role of Its National Strategic Pandemic Management Committee

Thomas Druetz  1   2 , Frank Bicaba  3   4 , Cissé Zainabou  3 , Abel Bicaba  3
Affiliations

Health Planning in Times of COVID-19 in Burkina Faso: The Role of Its National Strategic Pandemic Management Committee

Thomas Druetz et al. Community Health Equity Res Policy. 2025 Jul.

Abstract

ContextPresenting the COVID-19 crisis as a pandemic misleadingly implies a certain homogeneity between the regions of the Globe in terms of their burden and reactions. However, from the outset of the crisis, countries presented different epidemiological realities and sometimes adopted divergent, even opposing measures. Curiously, the heterogeneity of responses persisted as scientific evidence accumulated about COVID-19 and the strategies for dealing with it.Case studyThis commentary aims to recount the specific experience of Burkina Faso, and how it reoriented its initial biomedical response into a multisectoral strategy. Burkina Faso set up a committee specifically to examine the effects not only of the pandemic, but also of the control measures. This committee was mandated to decompartmentalize the lens through which the COVID-19 was dealt with. It entered into dialogue with a level of stakeholders often overlooked during national health crisis: communities. As a member of this "National Committee for Crisis Management of the Pandemic", one of the co-authors contributed to its orientations and has witnessed first-hand some of the challenges it faced.RecommendationsThis experience suggests that the project of extricating the field of public health from medicine is advancing in Burkina Faso. In order to manage future crises more effectively and across different sectors, there is an urgent need to establish state structures and to strengthen public health systems. States need coordination units that have the legitimacy, authority and resources required to mobilize a variety of actors at the community, national and international levels.

Keywords: Burkina Faso; COVID-19; crisis management; epidemic; health policy; strategic planning.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Map 1.
Map 1.
Map of Burkina Faso and its regions.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Trends of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Burkina Faso.
Figure A1.
Figure A1.
Trends in daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Burkina Faso.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Reference model of the national Covid-19 pandemic crisis response plan.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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