<<Print>>

The Aflao Border will soon have an ambulance and an isolation centre to ensure effective preparedness and response to potential public health crises.

Mr Kojo Wilcot, Border Management Officer at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said similar public health equipment and infrastructure would be provided at Elubo and Paga Borders.

He was speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency during a dissemination workshop for survey on trade facilitation, public health, and immigration response to COVID-19 in West Africa held at Aflao.

The soon-to-be rolled-out intervention formed part of phase two of an Immigration and Border Management project being implemented by the IOM with funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

Phase one of the year-long project was under the framework: “Data Collection Survey on Enhancing Border Facilitation and Strengthening Border Public Health Capacity in West Africa in response to infectious diseases/COVID-19”.

Mr Wilcot said the intervention aimed to address the vulnerability to the unpredictable impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic due to structural and health emergency deficiencies at the land borders not just in Ghana but in other West African countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin, and Burkina Faso.

“If you look at the Aflao Border, there is an urgent need for an ambulance. Under phase two of the JICA intervention, we will be providing an ambulance.

“Secondly, we realised there is an absence of an isolation centre. We will put a prefabricated isolation centre near the mobile laboratory that UNDP has put up, so the suspected cases are isolated.

“We will be resourcing Port Health with some tablets and laptops for effective data collection. Apart from them collecting data, they are in the position to transmit the data in real-time,” he said.