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INTERVIEW
with Béatrice Garrette
Executive Director of the Fondation Pierre Fabre
An unprecedented health crisis greatly impacted the world in 2020. How were the Foundation’s activities affected?
The Covid-19 pandemic slowed the implementation of some of our programmes and forced us to adapt our practices in places such as in Asia, where the Mékong Pharma Network was unable to continue in-person operations as planned. For classes to resume despite instructors being prohibited from travelling, we installed a distance-training tool – the Moodle platform – at partner universities. This means the crisis actually served to demonstrate the value of digital solutions in education and, naturally, healthcare. That was also the theme of the Global South eHealth Observatory conference in October 2020: we took stock of the many dematerialised initiatives that were implemented to help combat the epidemic, which impacts the way public health is structured in the long term.
The year 2020 was also important with respect to two key dimensions of the Foundation’s work: replicating projects in new areas and having them incorporated into national healthcare systems.
It’s true that our actions in the field of dermatology and addressing sickle cell disease continue to spread and gain momentum, such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Foundation has supported the Ministry of Health in developing a national plan that includes
The Foundation has also strengthened its long-standing partnership with the Order of Malta in Lebanon, in a country seeing economic collapse and the runaway impoverishment of its peoples.
We’re now providing structural support to the Lebanese Association of the Knights of Malta (ALCM), an organisation we’ve been working with for nearly 20 years, first by supporting the Khaldieh Medical-Social Centre, then a mobile medical unit, established in the Beqaa Valley. Now the objective is to reinforce the entire network of 11 health centres and six mobile medical units, spread across the Lebanese territory, to respond to the urgent need for quality primary healthcare – not only for Syrian refugees, but for the Lebanese population, as half these people are now in poverty. The good news is that the Agence Française de Développement has chosen to supplement the Foundation’s funding of the ALCM for the next three years. These additional monies will help us go deeper in our support for this organisation. The ALCM fights for solidarity and goodwill between communities: its day-to-day, tangible efforts serve to give the population hope and ensure it will be possible to rebuild the country.
treatment of sickle cell disease in the minimum
healthcare package. This is a first in sub-Saharan
Africa.
In the Central African Republic, the treatment model
for helping victims of sexual violence developed in
the DRC by Dr Denis Mukwege was replicated in Bangui in 2020. Despite the constant safety issues there, the NENGO project was born and that work began in earnest thanks to the efforts of the Central African, Congolese and French teams.
The crisis actually served
to demonstrate the value
of digital solutions in healthcare.
Fondation Pierre Fabre – 6