Many Sub-Saharan African countries’ governments have witnessed the negative impacts of COVID-19 globally. They are seeking to strengthen their own Crisis Management Units to prepare for and respond to the crisis.

As COVID-19 spreads to Sub-Saharan Africa, the World Health Organisation warns that the virus could claim up to 190,000 lives across Africa in 2020. However, there is still a lot that is unknown about the patterns of transmission, which sees some countries experiencing more cases than others. The overall capacity of a number of African national health systems to respond, as well as the ability of socio-economic systems to withstand the negative secondary impacts are assessed to be fragile.

Since 2018, Integrity has worked with Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) to provide external Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning support. TBI offers thought leadership and embedded delivery support to governments across Africa, working at the centre of government and in various ministries in up to fifteen countries. This includes supporting improvements to the delivery of reforms in the areas of economic growth, public health and energy policy, among others. Integrity works with TBI to provide technical assistance on ‘hard to measure’ activities and programmes, such as TBI’s Government Advisory portfolio of work across Africa.

From the onset of this crisis, TBI focused its efforts on playing a central role in the international pandemic response. TBI repositioned its work to support a range of African governments to make the right decisions and take the right actions more quickly. With its team of technical specialists, some of whom bring experience of the West Africa Ebola crisis, TBI has helped African government partners to create Crisis Management Units such as Presidential Taskforces, and deliver an effective public health response, procure essential equipment and repurpose manufacturing, address food insecurity and draft recovery plans.

Integrity is supporting TBI to design and adapt the MEL frameworks, systems and related research on its projects to adjust to COVID-19, generating new evidence for decision-making. Integrity’s Data and Knowledge Management specialists have developed dashboards to visualise daily data that TBI use to monitor COVID-19 trends across the countries they support.