USAID Soroka Grant: Strengthening Public Health Surveillance and Emergency Response in Madagascar

SOROKA is a Malagasy word which constitutes the root of the verb “misoroka”, meaning “to prevent”, corresponding to the aim of surveillance. SOROKA can be the acronym of the specific objectives of the project: Surveillance, Operational Research, and Optimization of Knowledge-sharing for Action activity.

The SOROKA activity is expected to be a $7.5 million award for five years from Oct 2024 to Sept 2029. SOROKA’s main objective is to advance the health of the Malagasy people through improvements in capacity-building and coordination and execution of data collection, management, synthesis, and use for public health action. Following the RISE project, SOROKA will enhance local capacity and expand leadership within the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) to detect threats to global health security, and to plan and conduct emergency outbreak response. It will reinforce the country’s capacity to plan, implement, and disseminate locally led research and evaluations, and increase public sector capacity to use epidemiologic and surveillance data for public health action.

SOROKA will be the main activity of USAID/Madagascar’s Health Office for research on malaria, MNCH (mother, neonatal, and child health), WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene), and GHS (global health security), for program evaluation, biological surveillance including AMR (antimicrobial resistance), emergency responses to health threats and institutionalization of epidemiology and laboratory data use for decision making. SOROKA will also provide targeted and need-based cross-sectorial training for the MOPH staff throughout its implementation. In general, SOROKA is intended to cover all HPN program elements, particularly malaria, MNCH, GHS and WASH.