Guinea - With support from the IOM Development Fund, IOM Guinea has successfully launched a project on “Developing a Migrant-Sensitive Health Service Delivery Model to Reach Miners in Upper Guinea”. The objective of the project is to contribute to improving the health status of migrants, mobile populations and hard-to-reach persons in the mining areas of the Siguiri Prefecture of Guinea.  

The prefecture of Siguiri is located in the Kankan administrative region of the country, where artisanal gold extraction attracts high volumes of migrants arriving from within Guinea, as well as from other countries (Burkina Faso, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, etc.) in search of opportunities. The Kankan region is particularly vulnerable to communicable diseases, such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), tuberculosis, malaria and epidemic-prone diseases. Migrants and mobile populations settle informally around active mines. These communities, which can reach more than 100,000 people, do not have access to basic social infrastructures, namely water points, schools and basic health facilities. Due to the lack of available healthcare services, the insufficiency of resources and the lack of adequate approaches, traditional health centres can hardly reach these spaces of vulnerability.

To address this situation, this project plans to develop a new gender-sensitive health service delivery model. The model will be developed on the basis of a mapping of the mining sites and appropriate spaces to deliver services and a study documenting the main factors contributing to low access to essential health services for migrants in mining areas in Siguiri, taking into account gender considerations. As such, the project will allow migrants, mobile populations and hard-to-reach groups in mining zones in Siguiri to access a comprehensive and gender-sensitive one-stop health service package for communicable diseases. A communication campaign will be organized to raise awareness among communities about the new health service delivery model, to ensure that they are well-informed on the existence of the service.

IOM is committed to reducing health inequities for migrants by advocating for migrant-inclusive health policies that focus on increasing health coverage, ensuring equitable access to healthcare and promoting financial risk protection, through advocacy, implementation, research and partnerships. By building resilient, accessible, and equitable health systems, migrant-inclusive Universal Health Coverage (UHC) can be attained. This proposed project will contribute to increasing disease detection and expanding access to essential health interventions among migrants, mobile populations and hard-to-reach persons to prevent the spread of priority communicable diseases in mining areas. The initiative is aligned with the achievement of the UHC objectives of the National Health Development Plan and the National Community Health Strategy in Guinea. The model developed by this pilot project will serve as an advocacy tool to engage donors and the private sector to scaling-up this intervention to the national level.