This activity focuses on the infrastructure of the health sector in pastoral areas, but emphasizes the need to introduce adaptations so as to take pastoralists into consideration.

It consists of:

• evaluating ‘current and past implementation activities and results regarding [the] accessibility of mobile and fixed health services’ in light of the ‘accessibility of national health services, quality of service, and standard and the mobility and livelihood of pastoralists’;
• considering the establishment of new and transparent working procedures;
• building new health facilities and strengthening existing ones so as to ensure accessibility by people in pastoral systems;
• ensuring reliable provision of water, electricity, and telephone services to pastoral health facilities in line with national standards.

COMMENTARY

1. Ensuring accessibility of the health service to people in pastoral systems. The description of this implementation activity emphasizes the intention to make health services in pastoral areas effectively accessible to the people in pastoral systems, including taking into account their mobility. The first point above is about evaluating existing facilities, and the third point is about modifying them (strengthening their accessibility) and building new ones in this light. It also specifies that this adaptation is to be made consistent with the national standard of quality of the health service.
2. Water, electricity, and telephone services. The last point under this activity is about ensuring that health facilities in pastoral areas, adapted to secure accessibility by people in pastoral systems and in light of their mobility, are not behind national standards in terms of basic utilities (water, electricity, and telephone). This would also imply a commitment to adapt the provision of basic utilities to make sure that they can effectively serve adapted health services in pastoral areas. Adequate coverage of the mobile phone network outside settlements, and the adoption of mobile water provision and solar power, would also seem the obvious ‘modern’ options.

e. Improve provision of inputs and system of administration (p.54) »