North-South workshop for an African decision-making framework for vaccines

A new meningococcal serogroup A conjugate vaccine (MenAfriVac), the first vaccine developed, manufactured and licensed in the global south for use in developing countries, is scheduled for introduction in Burkina Faso in 2009. Burkina Faso, located in the Sahel zone of West Africa, is one of the world's poorest countries. Meningococcal epidemics cause immense human suffering and bring enormous social and economic chaos for the affected countries. The advent of conjugate vaccine technology, which can produce vaccines that are immunogenic in very young children, has revolutionized the public health response to meningitis and other serious invasive bacterial disease in developing countries. But relentless social, political, and environmental constraints continue to challenge the practical roll-out and limit the effectiveness of new health technologies. We propose to bring together researchers from Burkina Faso and Canada in a two day workshop to develop a broadly based participatory evaluation project that will study the multi-level decision-making surrounding implementation of the vaccine and to evaluate its effect. Our goal is to develop an evidence-based, contextually-sensitive and flexible decision-making framework, derived from local knowledge, to be used by national health authorities planning and prioritizing health interventions in the global South. Our project will gather, analyze and iteratively model data from three related knowledge components: i) critical social science and ethnologic knowledge (socio-legal-geo-economic-political-ethical); ii) biologic/ technoscientific knowledge (immunological, clinical, epidemiological); and iii) engaged stakeholders knowledge, through the World Health Organization (WHO), the Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health (PATH), and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Atlanta, with whom we will exchange ethnological, epidemiological and immunologic data. The proposed workshop will be used to develop these plans.