Honorable ministers of Finance and Health
Esteemed health partners
Ladies and gentlemen
• Good morning. Thank you all very much for joining us on this beautiful Saturday morning, here in the financial hub of West Africa.
• This side event was carefully timed to coincide with two key events on finance, planning and economic development organized by our partners, the African Union Commission and the Economic Commission of Africa.
• As many of you will proceed from here to deliberate on these topics, I’d like you to reflect on something that is important and very dear to me.
• Ladies and gentlemen, you are absolutely critical to achieving my heart’s desire for Africa.
• An Africa where every mother gets the care she needs to safely deliver a healthy baby.
• An Africa where our youth face a future with promise, a prosperous future, a healthy future.
• An Africa where all people can get the healthcare they need – and deserve. This is Universal Health Coverage, which underpins all the health goals of the Sustainable Development agenda.
• We’re holding this meeting – now – because there is no time to waste if we hope to deliver on our commitments for the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
• Health is at the heart of the SDGs. It is a prerequisite, a determinant and an outcome of all the SDGs – not just a goal.
• Sustainable development needs health – and health needs sustainable financing.
• We’re seizing this day to get your perspectives on health financing, one of the objectives of this side event.
• You may know that yesterday the world commemorated World TB Day.
• We celebrated that we have the medicines and technologies to detect and treat this infectious deadly disease. But there are clouds on this horizon.
• About 1 million people in Africa are not diagnosed - mainly because of weak health systems with inadequate health financing - making them infectious to those around them.
• Weak health systems mean that people are being left behind – especially those living in poverty, the elderly, women and children on the sidelines of society.
• And drug resistance to TB is a looming global threat. In Africa, nearly 27-thousand drug resistant cases were reported in 2015.
• Only 70% accessed treatment.
• The drugs to treat this form of TB are very expensive – and only about half the people with drug resistant TB on treatment are eventually cured.
• Sustainable health financing is critical for Universal Health Coverage to deal with exactly this type of health problem.
• Something that is curable, for which the medicines exist, but which health systems struggle to manage.
• One of the objectives of this meeting is to discuss the health and economic burden of disease and other health needs and threats, and address these challenges.
• For instance, health services in many countries remain grossly underfunded, offering sub-standard services due to a lack of critical resources, including a shortage of human resources.
• By 2030, if nothing is done, we’ll be short of 6 million doctors, nurses, midwives and other healthcare professionals – our people won’t get the healthcare they deserve to thrive and prosper.
• Access to safe, affordable medicines is a challenge – for some important medicines, availability is as low as 21% in the public and 22% in the private sector in some African countries.
• In 75% of our member states, out-of-pocket payments by patients make up more than 20% of total health expenditure, a level which demonstrates financial barriers to accessing services.
• It’s not all bad news, though.
• Through collective efforts on the MDGs, health outcomes did improve in Africa:
o child mortality dropped by 54%,
o maternal mortality by 45%,
o and AIDS-related deaths declined, from 1.13 million to 0.8 million between 1990 and 2015.
• Several landmark Declarations on Financing for Health - Abuja in 2011 and Tunis in 2012 – also led to modest improvements in health. These will be discussed in more detail later in the programme.
• However, the current context of increasing healthcare costs, the decline in external financing, and the burden of disease threaten to erode these gains.
• The bottom line is: we need to invest more in health systems strengthening.
• How we do this is what this meeting is about.
• We’d like candid discussions on feasible and legitimate actions for sustainable health financing for health development.
• You are the highest caliber policymakers. I’m confident that you will come up with feasible steps to take this forward at future high level fora.
• Some thoughts to get the discussion going:
o How can we advance sustainable financing for resilient, robust health systems amidst shrinking economies?
o What do the honorable Ministers of Health and Finance present here believe are the best buys for health?
o What innovative strategies can we share for increasing health financing?
• What WHO plans to do is promote partnerships, and we welcome your thoughts on this too.
• WHO in the African Region sees itself as a catalyst for SDG action for health in Africa.
• We’ve already set the ball rolling.
o In December last year, we hosted the first Regional Forum on Strengthening Health Systems for achieving UHC in Windhoek, with countries and partners.
Here we agreed on an action framework, on mechanisms for monitoring progress, and on guidance for investments for attaining UHC.
This will be a regular forum to encourage the exchange of ideas and experiences.
o We will be hosting the first ever Africa Health Forum in Kigali, Rwanda in June.
This is a unique opportunity for engagement of all our partners – including the private sector, academic, civil society and philanthropic foundations – to kick start exciting new partnerships for improving the health of our people.
The theme is “Putting People First: the Road to Universal Health Coverage in Africa,” and I hope to see you all there.
o And today’s meeting lays the foundation for dialogue between Ministers of Health and Ministers of Finance to champion priority actions to improve financing for health within the SDGs.
• None of this is possible without you – your leadership, stewardship and good governance.
• I’d love you to share my heart’s desire for a healthy, prosperous African Region and make financing for health a sustainable reality.
Thank you again for your commitment to this and for coming here today.