Promotion of community-based care in Africa: example of community general practice in Benin

Considerable effort has been made to provide rural African populations with basic health care, but the quality of this care remains unsatisfactory due to the absence of first-line GPs. This is a paradoxical situation in view of the large number of physicians trained in medical schools in French-speaking Africa and Madagascar of the lack of GPs working in rural areas is a real concern, as many young doctors remain unemployed in cities. For more than 20 years, the NGO Sante Sud has proposed a Community General Medicine concept, which, combined with a support system, has allowed the installation of more than 200 community GPs in Mali and Madagascar. The advantage of this concept is that it provides family medicine and primary health care in the same practice. Since 2009, Sante Sud supports an installation project in rural areas of northern Benin, where community GPs work independently, as a complementary partner of the public sector. Since 2013, the installation process comprises a university degree created with the University of Parakou Faculty of Medicine. Based on this experience in Benin, the authors show that the presence of a first-line general practitioner is an original strategy that provides a major contribution to health promotion: reducing health inequalities between rural and urban populations, allowing women to receive medically assisted childbirth close to home, developing family planning activities, education and health care for chronic diseases, strengthening health coverage by participating in vaccination campaigns, etc. Due to their functions and proximity, community GPs represent an added value for health promotion.