The support is the result of the agreement signed by the Japanese embassy in Congo and local NGOs in March 2017. It is in line with the government’s ambition to ensure universal health coverage.

Last Friday, DR Congo launched a UNICEF-implemented digital health support project. The project, funded to the tune of US$2.5 million by Japan, aims to develop and deploy a digital vaccination record integrating a module to register births in the Kinshasa, Kongo-Central, Kasaï-Central, and Haut-Katanga provinces. The financial support is provided in the framework of an agreement signed by local NGOs and the Japanese embassy to DRC in March 2017.

According to DRC Minister of Public Health Jean-Jacques Mbungani, the project is of paramount importance because it will help improve the immunization and birth registration rates and also provide health staff and decision-makers with accurate and real-time information on immunization.

Over the past five years, DRC has improved its immunization rate to 85%, UNICEF says. However, the country still faces recurrent epidemics of vaccine-preventable diseases, including measles, polio, yellow fever, and meningitis. Also, the international organization informs that four out of 10 are registered in the civil registration database in the country; 38% of the children under 1 are registered against 40% for those under 5.

The digital health project aims to improve those figures and ensure broader health coverage by providing an efficient and reliable civil registration system and vital statistics.

Thanks to the digital record system, health personnel will be able to, among other things, monitor the status of birth registration and vaccinations of each child by recording this information in a national database. This system will allow for individualized follow-up and ensure that every child receives the necessary vaccines even if the latter is moved to a different region.  "Ultimately, this will greatly improve the accuracy of administrative data to better estimate immunization coverage, including routine immunization and Covid-19," said Hiro Minami, Japan’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Samira Njoya