Progress made towards global tuberculosis (TB) targets before the start of 2020, has been reversed by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a United Nations report. A multisectoral approach is seen as key to galvanising political commitments to end the TB epidemic, and WHO/Europe has been helping Member States to adopt this approach at a national and regional level.
TB is a disease which is highly impacted by social determinants such as poverty, malnutrition and poor living conditions. Collaborations between different governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders at all levels are needed to address the challenges faced by those affected and to enact measures to prevent TB transmission in workplaces, schools, on public transport and in prisons, among other settings.
The importance of a multisectoral approach has been a cross-cutting theme in political commitments to end TB, ever since the development of the WHO End TB Strategy, aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Multisectoral collaborations
Upon request from Member States, WHO developed a multisectoral accountability framework to accelerate progress to end the tuberculosis epidemic (MAF-TB). A baseline assessment checklist also helps countries launch the framework. MAF-TB can help support the process of defining who is accountable, what they are accountable for, and how they will be held accountable, at local and country levels, as well as regionally and globally.
WHO/Europe supports Member States to implement MAF-TB by working with ministries of health; national TB programmes; national coordination bodies, such as secretariats of the country coordinating mechanisms; and all stakeholders, including civil society, TB-affected communities and parliamentarians. In 2020–2021 WHO/Europe started technical collaborations with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Tajikistan and Ukraine, on how to operationalize and adapt MAF-TB at a national and regional level.
MAF-TB was developed following the first WHO Global Ministerial Conference on Ending TB in November 2017, and the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on the Fight against Tuberculosis.