WHO staff taking the fight against neglected tropical diseases to Africa’s remote

Brazzaville (Congo) - In places where roads dissolve into forest paths, rivers replace highways, and mobile signals fall silent, Africa’s fight against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) is carried forward by people who refuse to accept distance as an excuse. 

For WHO NTD experts working with ministries of health and partners, this is not an exception—it is the routine.

Along Kenya’s rivers and lake shores, Dr Joyce Onsongo, Neglected Tropical Diseases Officer at World Health Organization Kenya, confronts a disease shaped by water and poverty. Schistosomiasis thrives where livelihoods depend on rivers—where fishing, farming, bathing, and washing all take place in parasite-infested water. Children are most exposed, swimming and playing where invisible larvae lie in wait.

“Eliminating schistosomiasis is about breaking a cycle of disease and poverty,” she says. Early treatment prevents anaemia, stunting, and cognitive impairment—damage that can quietly define a child’s future. But reaching island communities and remote shorelines is relentless work. Poor roads, fragile supply chains, funding gaps, and myths about treatment all threaten progress.

Months after a mass drug administration in Migori County, a mother approached Dr Onsongo, smiling. “We thought passing blood in urine was a normal rite of passage for our boys,” she said. “Now we no longer see it.” For Dr Onsongo, that single sentence carries the weight of generations freed from disease.

Far to the northeast, among Ethiopia’s nomadic pastoralists, Dr Zeyede Kebede, Neglected Tropical Diseases Officer at WHO Ethiopia, follows migration routes—quite literally “following the cattle”—to deliver trachoma services across landscapes shaped by heat, dust, and constant movement. 

Literacy levels are low. Mobility is high. Yet care is delivered through mobile clinics, trusted health extension workers, and the full SAFE strategy: surgery, antibiotics, facial cleanliness, and environmental improvement.

He recalls Feysel Abdullahi, a herder who lived for years with searing eye pain, plucking out his own eyelashes so he could keep working. A simple 20-minute trichiasis surgery changed everything. “Now I work freely again,” Feysel said afterward. For Dr Kebede, the moment captured the essence of the work: restoring sight, dignity, and livelihoods where blindness once felt inevitable.

In Rwanda, Dr Jules Mugabo Semahore, Neglected Tropical Diseases Officer at WHO Rwanda, works at a different pace—but with the same intent. 

His battleground is trust. Health services here are rarely delivered behind clinic walls alone. 

In remote communities, conversations unfold under trees and in open fields, during umuganda community work days and Umugoroba w’ababyeyi—evening village dialogues where families openly debate health priorities.

“Community trust is as important as medicine,” he explains. Policies may be written at headquarters, but success is decided at village level. 

Community health workers—elected by their neighbours—bridge that gap, translating national strategies into household action. 

“When communities help set priorities, uptake is high. Results follow.” 

His motivation comes from watching ideas travel the full distance—from policy to practice, from paper to people.

In the Republic of the Congo, Dr Cyr-Judicael Passi-Louamba, Neglected Tropical Diseases Officer at WHO Congo, recalls a mission to some of the country’s most remote areas. 

He remembers the silence—no electricity, no internet. 

His team arrived carrying vaccines, mosquito nets, deworming tablets, and basic diagnostic tools—enough to run a public-health campaign from backpacks and notebooks. 

Children lined up as insecticide-treated nets were unfolded and medicines counted by hand. 

Among indigenous communities long excluded from formal health services, skin conditions linked to NTDs surfaced again and again.

“It affected us deeply,” he says. “But it also strengthened our resolve.” 

For Dr Passi-Louamba, the work is rooted in a simple principle: leaving no one behind is not a slogan—it is a responsibility. 

“Our passion comes from knowing these communities would otherwise be invisible.

In mountainous and forested regions of Ghana, Dr Felicia Owusu-Antwi’s work begins where even vehicles can go no further. 

Reaching villages affected by lymphatic filariasis often means hiking for hours along steep, narrow paths, sometimes slick with rain and mud. 

“If supervision and monitoring are difficult for us,” she reflects, “access to healthcare is even harder for the people who live there.”

She stresses that accurate data is as critical as medicine. 

Eliminating lymphatic filariasis depends on knowing where transmission persists, who is still at risk, and whether interventions are truly working. 

“Poor-quality or incomplete data can lead to premature intervention termination or, conversely, to continued treatment when it is no longer needed, both of which have serious consequences,” she says. 

Each data point, she insists, represents a person: a household living with stigma, a child reached or missed.

One encounter stays with her. In a remote community, she met a man living with advanced lymphatic filariasis, unable to work or fully participate in community life. 

When the man learned that elimination efforts could spare others the same fate, he said quietly, “At least my children won’t go through this.” 

For Dr Owusu-Antwi, that moment transformed abstract elimination targets into something deeply human. 

It reminded her that prevention is not just about disease control, but about protecting dignity and future generations.

These five WHO NTD experts operate in very different terrains—riverbanks, rangelands, village squares, forests, and mountain paths—but they share the same understanding: disease persists where access ends. Their work is often unseen. It requires carrying medicines, data tools, and patience in equal measure, adapting plans to floods, migration, and scarcity, and trusting that progress—though fragile—is real.

According to Dr Elizabeth Juma, Team Lead for the Expanded Special Project for Elimination of NTDs (ESPEN), success in Africa’s push to eliminate NTDs will not be decided in conference rooms alone. “It will be decided in canoes without engines, in meetings under trees, on riverbanks at dawn, and in nomadic camps at sunset—where NTD experts continue to go when the map runs out, and where lives quietly change as a result.”

Beyond statistics and strategies, these journeys reveal what elimination truly demands: presence. As Africa moves closer to ending neglected tropical diseases, progress will be carried not only by medicines and plans, but by people who understand that the last mile is not a distance—it is a commitment, renewed every time they choose to go where few others will.

World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day is observed every year on 30 January. This year’s theme Unite, Act, Eliminate, calls for sustained political will, adequate financing and decisive action to address these diseases.