In sub-Saharan Africa, raising population awareness on the health impacts from exposure to household air pollution and prevention through clean cooking, heating and lighting is essential in the drive to scale transition to clean modern energy.

CLEAN-Air(Africa) has developed a comprehensive training programme for educating community health workers in HAP, health and prevention in their role as health promoters under universal health coverage. The Community Household Air Pollution Prevention Programme (CHAP-PP) was accepted into the Kenyan training curricula for CHWs by the Ministry of Health in 2021 and has since been rolled out across all 47 counties of Kenya.

Next week the CLEAN-Air(Africa) health systems strengthening lead, Nancy Chebichii, is launching CHAP-PP in Rwanda together with our project staff at the Rwanda Biomedical Centre (3rd to 5th June). The launch will coincide with a WHO stakeholder workshop in Kigali (5th to 7th June) to present their Clean Household Energy Solutions Toolkit (CHEST), educating clinicians and healthcare workers in primary and secondary prevention on household air pollution (HAP). Training in CHAP-PP will be a significant part of this workshop. Working together, CLEAN-Air(Africa) and the WHO are planning a health systems approach to addressing the burden of disease from HAP.

This week, Nancy and the team met with trainers from the Rwanda Ministry of Health to prepare for the three-day training event for Rwandan community health workers in CHAP-PP.

These train-the-trainer preparatory sessions helped set the scene for next week’s training including an action plan for training, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation in Rwanda to transition to clean cooking, heating, and lighting, aiming to reduce the country’s disease burden from household air pollution.

For more information about the Community Household Air Pollution Prevention Programme (CHAP-PP), please contact cleanair@liverpool.ac.uk