The WHO Reaching Every District (RED) Strategy will now be piloted in Tuv (Central) province of Mongolia. The project is enabled by a grant of 50000 USD from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in support of a project proposal submitted to the CDC by the Mongolian National Centre for Communicable Diseases (NCCD). WHO Country Office in Mongolia has helped the local agencies to submit the proposal.
The RED Strategy will be piloted as one of the channels of sub-national health system strengthening in Tuv province for the period of one year starting in March 2016. Tuv province was chosen for the pilot project due to being one of the largest of 21 provinces of Mongolia. Comparatively significant spread of illegal mining practices in the province that causes malpractice of immunization activities when children of migrant workers do not get scheduled vaccines also contributed to Tuv province becoming a pilot site.
WHO Country Office in Mongolia is advocating for sub-national health system strengthening through multilateral support rendered to local governments. WHO supported two pilot sites from 2013: Umnugobi province in rural Mongolia and Songinokhairkhan district in the capital city Ulaanbaatar. Currently WHO is expanding its sub-national health system strengthening support to a number of districts and provinces in partnerships with UNICEF, World Vision, Norwegian Lutheran Mission, Embassies of the Czech Republic and Turkey and international NGOs.
‘Reaching Every District’ (RED) is the name given to a strategy of district capacity building to address common obstacles to increasing immunization coverage, with a focus on planning and monitoring. The first steps in developing the RED strategy were taken in July 2002 at a meeting of immunization partners, who identified common obstacles and ways to improve access to immunization to achieve the global immunization goal of 90% coverage nationally and 95% of coverage at district level by 2020.