Tanzania
Abubakar M. Maghimbi, MD
Tanzania Country Director
Just as for any other disease, the fight against the HIV pandemic in Africa has been a long journey. From the 1980’s when the first HIV cases emerged in Africa, countries have moved from periods of confusion, mobilization, and strategic fighting to organisation, control, and coordinated HIV disease management.
Tanzania is among the nations who have undergone such a transformation. We have travelled a journey through which we have progressively developed and adopted modern and evidence-based HIV management methods. Over the past 10 years, Ciheb has played an important role in supporting Tanzania’s health systems by designing and building novel data management systems that have revolutionized HIV care in the country.
For the past five years Ciheb Tanzania has worked hand in hand with the Tanzanian government to build capacity of healthcare workers on health data management. As Tanzania nears the achievement of the UNAIDS 95-95-95 goals, accurate HIV data management plays a critical role in achieving epidemic control. To improve on accessibility and reliability of HIV data in government data warehouses, Ciheb Tanzania has pioneered and build several data collection and data quality check solutions. Among them is a system that interacts with DHIS2 to pull out data elements with wrong entries for monitoring and evaluation officers to easily do corrections. This real-time data-quality-assurance tool enables healthcare workers to quickly examine big datasets and identify places with errors for quick fixes. Resulting clean data is thereafter transferred to upline managers and eventually to the Tanzania Ministry of Health (MoH) for analysis, interpretation, action, and feedback.
Complete, accurate and reliable data is among the priority agenda items needed to achieve epidemic control globally. Recognizing this need, Ciheb Tanzania has crossed borders and collaborated with other Ciheb African country programs to build capacity on data systems for their programs. Specifically, Ciheb Tanzania has worked with Nigeria, Zambia and Kenya country teams to transfer technology on data management for HIV programs. In addition to building capacity on data quality assurance, Ciheb Tanzania has also shared technology on continuous quality improvement (CQI) systems to Ciheb teams in Rwanda, Zambia, and Kenya. These collective efforts will not only help Tanzania realize an improved epidemic control program, but also build capacity among other African countries in their struggle to achieve 95-95-95 epidemic control goals.
During the COVID-19 outbreak, the systems that Ciheb Tanzania built have enabled our country team to work closely with the MoH and regional and district management teams to remotely support the facilities through data analysis and clinical mentorships by using ECHO platforms, the Data Analysis Companion (a powerful tool developed by Ciheb Tanzania that performs in-depth patient-level data analytics), and our CQI web application.
Country Director Abubakar Maghimbi, MD, has 17 years of experience in infectious diseases and more than 8 years working on PEPFAR funded projects. He is also an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine and adjunct faculty of the UMB School of Medicine.
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