Cabo Verde’s health and social assistance systems need to adapt to an ageing population - to provide relevant prevention and health promotion programmes and curative services. A more agile and responsive health and social assistance system will address the growing and varying needs of the elderly. The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) requested WHO Cabo Verde's technical cooperation to help implement strategies aimed at this demographic. The Integrated Care for Older People (ICOPE) guidance was considered an agile and appropriate strategy, presenting six comprehensive and integrated domains of intervention. With its implementation, health service providers have become aware of the needs of the elderly – creating dedicated care spaces, establishing elderly service days, and visiting communities across the pilot health centres. These initial steps will improve the quality of elderly care for this population, with early signs that the elderly have increased morbidity.

How did Cabo Verde, with the support of the WHO Secretariat, achieve this?

People globally are living longer. Most people born today can expect to live into their sixties and beyond. Ageing is a biological event, the result of an accumulation of molecular and cellular damage over time leading to a gradual decrease in physical and mental capacity, along with growing risk of disease [1].

In Cabo Verde, life expectancy in 2020 was 75 years of age, just above the global average [2]. This has been consistently increasing over the past few decades, bringing with it health system challenges. The population above 60 years of age has been growing – from 7.6% in 2010 to 10.0% in 2021 [3]. This population represents an increasing proportion of the burden of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD), which cause roughly 60% of all deaths in the country [4,5]. The MoPH created the national programme for the health of the elderly in 2015 and developed the first strategic plan in 2017. The programme and strategy were later aligned to the WHO Decade on Healthy Ageing 2021-2030.

In August 2019, WHO Cabo Verde was invited by the MoPH to support this plan and presented the ICOPE guidelines to the national authorities as an agile and efficient approach. The ICOPE proposes evidence-based recommendations for health care professionals to prevent, slow or reverse declines in physical and mental capacities of older people. They include six domains of intervention related to limited mobility, depressive symptoms, cognitive decline, malnutrition, visual impairment, and hearing loss. COVID-19 disrupted implementation of ICOPE, but from September 2021 WHO Cabo Verde organized trainings to orientate stakeholders on the steps to take for healthy ageing. WHO Cabo Verde also convened politicians, health professionals, social workers, researchers, community representatives, and the elderly to understand and implement this approach. This was an important step towards mutual ownership and sustainability of the actions and their results.