Corporate Partnerships

Leveraging the Expertise of the Private Sector

Accordia Global Health Foundation’s programs are careful designed with our partners to maximize our joint efforts in building Africa’s capacity to fight infectious disease by building healthcare capacity and strengthening medical institutions. Through partnerships with major corporations, Accordia has delivered results far beyond what any single organization could hope to accomplish on its own. Together, we are developing proven training, research, and treatment models to overcome the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases in Africa.

Pfizer Inc – Developing and Proving Models

Through generous support from Pfizer Inc, Accordia Global Health Foundation established a regional treatment, research and training institute in Kampala, Uganda to strengthen local and regional capacity in HIV/AIDS care. After only 5 years this regional source of excellence, the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI), is a world-class institute with state-of-the-art clinical facilities, modern training rooms, and one of the few College of American Pathologists (CAP) accredited laboratories in sub-Saharan Africa. IDI training, clinical treatment, and research help to establish leading practices and standards of care throughout Africa. Today this public-private partnership is a model of success demonstrating that ambitious goals can be accomplished when the right partners are properly aligned.

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BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) – Partnering for Laboratory Excellence

Accordia Global Health Foundation and BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) partnered to create the BD “Center of Excellence” in Laboratory Training at the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) in Kampala, Uganda. The objective of this partnership is to build and transfer laboratory capacity, to improve the skill level associated with diagnostics & testing for laboratory technicians, and to mentor the future leadership of laboratories across Sub-Saharan Africa. This effort represents a critical, and often unnoticed, step in creating a comprehensive solution to the healthcare crisis currently ravaging the African continent.

To date this partnership has achieved great success in developing and implementing a training program to train laboratory technologists with the skills to manage HIV related laboratories and the capacity to train others in quality laboratory services which in turn improves the level of healthcare delivery in Uganda.

In 2008, Accordia once again partnered with BD to strengthen laboratory systems in Africa in support of a major public-private partnership between BD and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Accordia developed a program in which IDI provided technical assistance, curriculum development assistance, and support for BD PEPFAR volunteers and partners during their inaugural laboratory training program in Uganda. Together this partnership is working to improve overall laboratory systems and services in African countries severely affected by HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

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Gilead Sciences, Inc. – Mentoring Tomorrow's Academic Leaders

With generous support from the Gilead Foundation, Accordia Global Health Foundation established the Gilead Infectious Disease Scholarship Program in July 2005. Based at the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) of Makerere University in Kampala, the program was designed to transition the brightest young Ugandan clinicians into internationally-recognized, independent scholars and researchers. The program creates protected research time, resources, and intensive mentoring opportunities for competitively selected individuals with high potential for success, enabling ambitious candidates at various stages of their career to succeed to degrees not often possible in resource-poor settings.

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ExxonMobil – Improving Malaria Prevention, Treatment, and Diagnosis

 In 2005, Accordia launched the Joint Uganda Malaria Training Program (JUMP) in partnership with ExxonMobil’s Africa Health Initiative. This exemplary training program at the Infectious Disease Institute (IDI), executed in partnership with the Uganda Malaria Surveillance Project, builds capacity among African healthcare workers in malaria prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

Since then, Accordia and ExxonMobil have continued to join forces to improve malaria treatment and diagnosis in Africa. A program was designed to evaluate the clinical effectiveness and safety of a basic training program incorporating rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) as compared with standard-of-care presumptive treatment, for the management of patients who present with suspected malaria at peripheral health centers in Uganda. Accordia and IDI then adapted the model to national scale by adding modified field-based components for facilities with and without laboratory capacity. This model was formally endorsed by Uganda’s Ministry of Health for the national roll out of training health workers in the management of fever using RDT and adopted by the Stop Malaria project and PMI/CDC to train healthcare workers on the laboratory diagnostic component of malaria case management. By the end of 2008, over 800 healthcare workers had completed JUMP’s multidisciplinary team-based malaria training at IDI.

Looking forward, Accordia will continue to improve malaria training in Africa by building on the model’s remarkable success over the last three years, and by promoting the National Malaria Training Model for use in other parts of Africa

 Together through partnership, Accordia and ExxonMobil are working to meet the challenges of battling malaria in a resource-limited setting with poor healthcare infrastructure and high levels of poverty.

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