His Excellency Umaro Sissoco Embaló, President of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau and chair of ALMA, launched the ALMA Joyce Kafanabo Awards for Excellence and Innovation on the side lines of the AU Summit in February 2023.

There are 6 award categories:

• Best malaria scorecard tool
• Best RMNCAH (reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health) scorecard tool
• Best NTD (neglected tropical diseases) scorecard tool
• Best community scorecard tool
• Best institutionalisation of scorecard tools across malaria and RMNCAH
• Best innovative use of scorecard tools

Honouring Joyce Kafanabo’s legacy

These awards are named after Joyce Kafanabo, a founding member and senior director at ALMA, who tragically passed away in 2021. These awards honour Joyce’s incredible contributions to the diplomatic service and the fight against malaria.

Celebrating scorecard excellence and innovation

The awards celebrate countries that have made the most progress on digitalisation, and the strengthening of country scorecard management tools through:

• public sharing of the scorecard
• capacity building at sub-national level to enhance data-driven decision making
• use of the tool with the community to empower all citizens to improve health services and outcomes

Independent awards committee and Scorecard Maturity assessments

We established an independent awards committee for the awards, and they helped to choose the award categories, assess the countries’ progress, and select the successful countries. To help the awards committee, we assessed each country using the Scorecard Maturity assessment tool which helps identify where a country scorecard is performing well and where it needs further improvement.

Countries can use the Scorecard Maturity self-assessment tool to improve their scorecards and increase the chance of winning future scorecard awards.