Addis Ababa 13 March 2019: The National Action Plan for Health Security (NAPHS) is a country owned, multi-year planning process that will accelerate the implementation of International Health Regulation (IHR) core capacities, and is based on a One Health for all-hazards, whole-government approach. The NAPHS captures the national priorities for health security, brings sectors together, identifies partners and allocates resources for health security capacity development.  

Since 2016, WHO has been working closely with many countries and its partners to support the development of NAPHS.
WHO developed the NAPHS framework to consolidate technical guidance to countries for the development and implementation; capturing feedback from countries, regions and partners. It provides guidance to identification of evidence-based priority actions that can be implemented quickly to have immediate impact as well as the long-term actions for sustainable capacity development to improve health security.

Ethiopia is one of the countries that adopted IHR (2005) aiming to prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease and to establish a single code of procedures and practices for routine public health measures.

Ethiopia is making significant advances in the implementation of the IHR and the country is planning to launch the NAPHS on Friday 15th March 2019 in the presence of senior government officials from the Prime Minister’s Office. The resource mapping workshop started on 13th of March and is expected to be completed on 14th of March 2019.The NAPHS helps the country to strengthen the 19 capacities identified in the recommendation of the Joint External Evaluation (JEE) report to prevent, detect and rapidly respond to public health threats in Ethiopia.

WHO teams from the Country Office, Regional, the Hub in Nairobi and HQ supported the government in all three steps operational frameworks including the internal and external evaluation process which finally led to the development of the NAPHS.

The NAPHS budget for the first five years (2019-2023) is estimated at over 368,729,414 USD and the resource mapping exercise started today in Addis Ababa, at the United Nations Conference Center (UNCC) where different government sectors, donors, UN Agencies, NGOs and other partners are taking part.

For Further information contact:
Dr. Aggrey Bategereza, WHE Team Lead
Email: Bategerezaa [at] who.int
Mobile: +251960403644

Dr. Abiy Girmay, Prepardness and IHR (OIC)
Email: girmaya [at] who.int
Mobile: +251 911 56 85 81