Honorable Ministers of Health
Distinguished guests
• Thank you for your interest in this side event on how WHO in the African Region is reforming the way it works.
• I set up the Transformation Agenda in January 2015, and we’ve reached the midpoint of this initiative.
• Today’s event will showcase the key achievements we’ve made, our plans for the next phase, and how our reforms are impacting on the health of people.
• We’ll hear from the Ministers of Health in Botswana, Mozambique and Cameroon on how the transformation agenda has had a ripple effect on their own health systems, and I’m very pleased that DFID will share a partner’s perspective.
• The Ebola outbreak in 2014/15 was an unprecedented challenge for WHO, and demonstrated that the Organization needed to be more effective in its work.
• The Director-General announced global reforms to ensure that WHO becomes a better organization.
• WHO has a unique leadership position in health, and in the complex public health landscape of the 21st century, we are adapting and transforming to be at the forefront of improving health from a stronger position than before.
• It’s important that we do this now, because public health in the African Region is very challenging, possibly more so than any other region in WHO.
• As you probably know, most of our countries are lower-income with weak health systems. In making the first step in addressing this, in the context of Transformation Agenda, we have since mobilized Member States and partners, through an action and implementation framework, to prioritize strengthening their Health Systems for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Universal Health Coverage (UHC).
• The SDG standing committee has since been established in the Regional Office to intensify health advocacy efforts across governments to ensure that the SDGs and Universal Health Coverage remain at the forefront of political and development agendas.
• In addition, we have a burgeoning youth population with limited prospects, sprawling urbanization, a high burden of communicable diseases and an upsurge in non-communicable diseases and injuries.
• An opportunity has emerged to harness the demographic dividend presented by our youth and we set up and are implementing a Flagship Programme targeting Adolescent Health as a proxy to monitor progress on health improvement in view of achieving Universal Health Coverage.
• It is on that basis that the WHO Regional Office for Africa encourages Member States to prioritize high-impact adolescent health interventions in national strategies that seek to strengthen health systems.
• The Ebola outbreak, though extremely tragic, presented us with an opportunity to organize ourselves better.
• We have strengthened our emergencies response mechanism and this has been demonstrated by the swift response to controlling the yellow fever outbreak in Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo in 2016.
• We continue to ensure that our Region is certified polio free. It is now ten months since the last wild case of polio was detected in August 2016 in Nigeria.
• WHO in the African Region is determined to play a transformational role to change the continent’s future by strengthening global health and economic security, and achieving the goals in the new era of sustainable development.
• Since the day I was elected as WHO Regional Director for Africa, I committed myself to transform WHO Secretariat in the African Region into a more responsive and results-focused organization.
• An organization that will meet the needs and expectations of its Member States and Partners.
• The Transformation Agenda is how we are doing this. It is bold, relevant and timely, with a clear strategy for organizational change. I’ll present more details on this shortly.
• The Transformation Agenda is turning the Regional Office for Africa into an organization that focuses on results, is transparent, accountable, appropriately resourced and equipped to deliver on its mandate of improving the health of Africa’s people.
• In our focus on results, we will be launching the WHO/AFRO Results Framework which has been developed in the context of the Transformation Agenda. We understand the old adage “what gets measured gets done” and we are happy to share the framework with you today.
• Thank you all again for being here, and for your active support on this transformation journey.
• I look forward to your feedback and ideas for improvement.