Africa does not need more money, rather, it needs to use more efficiently what it has, UNAIDS reports. This was said during the World Bank Africa Development Forum 2013 conference held in Washington, DC.
“We need more money for health and more health for money in Africa,” said Makhtar Diop, Vice President of the World Bank Group, Africa Region in his opening remarks. “This landmark conference aims to jointly decide on concrete actions for countries and show partners how to further invest in health and sustainable growth in Africa,” he added.
Participants pointed out that whereas the average per capita health spending in Africa is low, it is higher than in many South Asian countries where health outcomes are considered generally better. This shows that Africa not only needs more health financing but it needs to spend what it has more effectively.
According to UNAIDS, participants in the conference said that several key characteristics of the continent’s health systems need to be urgently addressed, one of them being financing of health in the continent.
UNAIDS says that many African countries are still heavily dependent on external resources to finance their health sector. In 26 of 33 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, donor support accounts for more than half of HIV investments. Participants defined this dependency as a serious sustainability issue requiring more self-sufficiency and building of domestic capacity with self-financing as the ultimate goal.
Speaking in the conference, the Minister of Finance for Nigeria Hon. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said that it is not only the volume of financing that matters but how that really responds to the need of the poor.
“In a country deciding on how to best respond to those needs, political will and leadership are key,” she said. In Africa, a shift from investments that focus on inputs and processes to those that focus on results and systemic changes is already underway. Health sector reforms and efficiency improvement initiatives, results-based financing (RBF), and public-private partnerships in many countries have resulted in rapid scaling up of service coverage and improved efficiency in how resources are used for health.
In Kenya, the newly elected government has promised that maternity fees will be abolished and that all citizens will be able to access government dispensaries and health centres free of charge within the first one hundred days of its leadership.
The conference comes at a time when there is a transition in the ministry of health in Kenya, which currently does not have a substantive minister at the head. The president yesterday named Mr. James Maina Macharia as the new Cabinet Secretary for Health. His name will be taken to parliament for approval before he is formally appointed by the president.
Currently, many sub-Saharan African countries have established social safety nets through which people with limited or no resources may have improved access to basic health services so that they do not have to skip necessary health care or carry costs related to accessing health.
According to Dr. Kiambo Njagi of the Division of Malaria Control of the ministry of public health, the government distributes for free 2.4 million mosquito nets yearly, targetting pregnant women and children under 5 years found in rural populations in endemic areas.
Another recent government initiative is a plan to distribute seven million rapid diagnostic kits for testing for malaria. These will be availed through government and faith based health facilities for the next five years.
These are a few of the initiatives that the Kenyan government has so far taken, with support from other partners, to ease the health burden of its citizens.
Closing the conference, the President of The World Bank Group Dr Jim Yong Kim said that the group will help countries to get innovative systems for health to lift the burden of health care. “We have a unique opportunity to recommit ourselves to universal access to health that is critical for short, medium and long term growth, ending poverty and building shared prosperity,” he said.
The conference brought together Ministers of Finance and Health from 30 African countries to explore effective and creative ways to ensure the future health of the continent. Under the theme of ‘Finance and Capacity for Results’, the forum was meant to identify concrete strategies to ensure that investments in health produce sustainable results on a large scale. It also sought to find ways to finance and build institutional capacity so that African countries can design, implement and evaluate health investments.
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