For those of you following the Emergency Operating Center (EOC) Pilot Project, that we have been working, below is a quick update. From a health standpoint, Ebola has finally started to make a decline in daily reported cases. Schools in Sierra Leone are talking about re-opening and in the meantime the radio program will stay in effect. So things are headed in a much more positive direction than before the new year. With that said, there is still a ways to go to get Sierra Leone back to where it was before this devastating setback.
TVL's long time trusted partner, SBTS Group, will be sending an employee up to Golu this week to assess the situation and from there, we will jointly discuss the best strategy to launch the EOC pilot. This is a project that we both believe the CDC would like to see to help with today's crisis and tomorrows. There are long term plans to roll the same EOC template out across the country in various rural communities, if this pilot can prove to be a success in Golu. The goal of this project is to decentralize the response and reduce response times for emergency health reports. Currently, there is one response center in Freetown which feeds information out to the rest of the country. A faster response time is needed in order to get ahead of a major health crisis such as the Ebola outbreak. By installing EOC's across the country the response time should be able to be reduced.
In addition to SBTS Group leading the charge on the EOC pilot project, they have also graciously offered to provide Golu with a software that will track student illness reports per school. With schools re-opening and groups of people starting to gather again, before Ebola is completely gone, it will help give parents and educators peace of mind knowing that this type of information is being tracked.
As more updates come up we will continue to update you on this project.
