Nairobi, October 19, 2018 - The 10th Harmonization for Health in Africa (HHA) annual Regional Directors meeting has ended in Nairobi with a renewed commitment to optimize joint efforts towards health systems strengthening for realization of Universal Health coverage (UHC) and health security in Africa.

HHA Partners also committed to strengthen dialogue, enhance leadership and collaboration of health, finance and the private sector, and intensify support to countries. 
They further agreed to strengthen HHA’s working relationship with Ministries of Health other sector ministries and stakeholders including the private sector, humanitarian institutions, and major health development platforms.

The meeting held from October 18-19 was attended by HHA regional directors including WHO’s Dr Matshidiso Moeti from the WHO African Region. Other representation was from HHA membership including UNICEF, UNFPA, African Development Bank, World Bank, USAID, JICA, Global Fund, UNAIDs, UN Women France and Partnership for Maternal, New Born and Child Health. It was preceded by a preparatory Technical Meeting (October 16-17th) with all partners within the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the African Union Health Strategy 2016 – 2030 and the Agenda 2063. 

It reviewed progress made, strategic orientations and priorities to determine way forward and emerging issues since the last meeting held in Dakar in March 2017. 
Members took note of the numerous public health emergencies that had the potential to further weaken health systems and communities and which continued to disrupt national economic activities, threaten peace and reverse current health gains. These concerns were also affected by an environment of demographic transformation, rapid urbanization, climate change and limited focus on determinants of health.

Discussions further focused on the five key priority areas including health financing and governance; knowledge generation and information; gender equity, women, children and adolescent health; integrated service delivery, human resources and community systems. It also focused on health security, which underlies issues of support for national action plan for health security (NAPHS) and the contribution to the implementation and evaluation of country post crisis recovery plans.

The partners agreed to support and exert leadership toward the achievement of these HHA priorities including creating new partnerships and an enabling environment that allows different stakeholders to undertake transformational change in the context of the sustainable development agenda.
“As a form of creating an effective responsive platform, we also want find opportunities to provide information and data for countries to act on but also to draw on key actions beyond the national plans,” Dr Moeti said.  

Members further agreed to devote their efforts to selected countries, supporting coordination mechanism where they were weak and strengthening technical capacities to build stronger and more resilient health and community systems and accompanying critical reforms. 

Harmonization for Health in Africa (HHA) is a joint regional effort to support governments in Africa in strengthening their health systems. It was created as a mechanism to facilitate and coordinate the process of country-led development in all aspects of health systems strengthening. This includes health financing, human resources for health, pharmaceutical and supply chains, governance and service delivery, infrastructure and ICT.