Expanding our Ebola data team to Sierra Leone and Liberia
We said goodbye at the end of 2018 to our first group of trainee data managers from Liberia and Sierra Leone. It has been great to have their skilled input now boosting our 2019 Ebola Data Team. It is all part of the launch of the Ebola Data Platform in Sierra Leone and Liberia – a collaborative effort across Ebola-affected countries, international aid organisations, and IDDO.
Trokon Yeabah and Fayiah Tamba from Liberia, and Musa Feika from Sierra Leone were based at the IDDO office for a month of intensive training with our data team here in Oxford. This was part of a capacity building programme aimed at providing a central data repository to facilitate higher-powered analyses and advance the understanding of Ebola ahead of future outbreaks. Curating the data is critical to achieving this, as it will ensure that all databases can be pooled, standardised and made available to the research community.
This growing collaboration between the Ministry of Health and Sanitation of Sierra Leone, Liberia’s National Public Health Institute, IDDO, and neighbouring national public health agencies has strengthened the role of these agencies in the design and delivery of Ebola data curation to underpin local use, data ownership and long-term sustainability of the Platform.
This collaboration will not only enable the most powerful analyses of Ebola data to date, but will establish a model of data sharing focused on locally driven research and training priorities. This can be expanded to other diseases and countries to harness the power of collaboration to address the risk of emerging infections.