Rwanda NCDI Group

The NCDI Poverty Network’s recent week of advocacy in Rwanda included visits to two hospitals, a conference with more than 700 attendees, a panel with four expert speakers, and one recurring theme: the recognition that PEN-Plus is an effective model for mobilizing action and financing to increase access to care for people living with severe, chronic noncommunicable diseases.

Camps that bring together young people living with a severe noncommunicable disease are showing that the benefits of integrated care can extend far beyond clinical settings. The first such camps—held this year in Rwanda and Zimbabwe—hosted young people with type 1 diabetes, sickle cell disease, and childhood heart disease.

Access to care for back pain, food insecurity, and abnormal vaginal bleeding. Overcoming the barriers to care posed by the high costs of transportation to clinic and missing work. Care delivered in a way that respects both dignity and privacy. Those were some of the top healthcare priorities that women in rural Rwanda identified in an International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics study.

More than 60 representatives of leading global health policy, technical, advocacy, and financing institutions and people living with NCDs gathered at UNICEF House in New York on September 15, 2022, to introduce the PEN-Plus Partnership, a major international initiative to address the global burden of severe NCDs and injuries that cause more than 500,000 avoidable deaths every year among children and young adults living in extreme poverty.

A training model that combines in-person classroom instruction with a digital, e-learning platform has been successfully piloted in Rwanda to train PEN-Plus nurses and physicians in the knowledge, skills, and competencies to diagnose and treat heart failure.